Yeah, but we were all still doing it anyways. Maybe not for our web pages, but definitely for our apps. I don’t think that part of react has ever been very controversial to people who were already building large webapps to begin with.
But it was controversial. The React team even got ridiculed early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY#t=35s
And the person who wrote that tweet wasn't alone. It's perhaps easy to forget how much opposition there was to React. Facebook was quite a bit further than many in the industry, and Pete Hunt from Facebook admits that "we weren't communicating what we were doing".
It was a bit much to swallow for many at first, but in the end, the VDOM was such a powerful idea that React was destined to take off sooner or later.