I didn't mean to say that React is bad, quite the opposite! It's a wonderful library and for good reason. But I've never used the OOP parts of it, because I like structuring my applications without a framework, customized to the domain I'm working on. Several mutable classes as a basic structure of an application is a no-go for me. Luckily, you could, can (and in my opinion should) use React without those parts, and the library works just fine as a VDOM engine.

Again, Facebook did an incredible job. I'm just commenting on why some people (not me) feel like React is "just another framework oh my god when does this stop". If they released the VDOM engine separately and the framework parts after that, people would understand that you can build your application in a way where you can pop out React and replace it with any other VDOM implementation. Most people don't seem to know this, and that's why they insist on calling it a framework.

Also, JSX caused so much confusion among people who were used to template engines. There was a huge opposition to React as a whole simply because JSX looked weird when people were explicitly taught to never mix JS with HTML. React didn't need JSX to work. For my first applications I didn't use it because I didn't want an extra compilation step, and the build/packaging tools back then were quite painful when compared to those of today. I could use React perfectly fine and it did its job in pure JS. JSX to me was just syntactic sugar, but it became a huge red herring to people who were introduced to React.