You have components with a render method, and in that render method you return other components which you can pass data to via "props" - that's basically react in a nutshell.
I've noticed React is often conflated with the wider ecosystem it is a part of (Webpack, Redux, Babel) - perhaps this is the complexity you are referring to, but to be clear React can be used without any of these things.
And sure React being developed by Facebook couldn't have hurt in terms of it gaining popularity - but the real reason it took off is that in contrast to what you said it removed a huge amount of complexity by alleviating the burden of developers having to manipulate the DOM directly in ad hoc ways. Instead of having to manually add classes, add elements, remove elements, append children, you could just say given this piece of state, give me this.
> Anything that comes out of Facebook is just pure manipulation.
This just shows that your issue lies with facebook the company, which is biasing you against react - the technology.