I understand where the Redux terminology gets mixed up with React and people believe they're one and the same, but it's totally possible to do React without touching reducers, actions, or Redux.

Maybe you mean it's not realistic to write React "beyond toy examples" or "in the real world" without Redux, but still, I'd beg to differ there. You can get very far with plain React and the context API and other libraries. Redux definitely isn't required.

Forgo does look cool though! I like the idea of using plain variables for state, and returning an object allows you to add other things to that object (didMount, didUpdate, unmount etc).