Redux, IMO is a beautiful state management library.

Were you following Dan’s tutorial on Redux? Because that is a beautifully made tutorial as well. (https://egghead.io/redux)

If you have tried to build a substantially big app with React alone, you will find yourself lost in passing down the props and callbacks and hoisting variables and what not. You definitely need a state management library where you can CRUD from all your React components. Thats where Redux/Mobx comes into picture, unless you want to write a new one.

I agree that Redux needs a lot of boilerplate though.