The “pretends” comment is light hearted joke (or is it?) about keeping Redux UI library agnostic. When we all know React is the 8000 pound gorilla pulling on Redux.

The default assumption for any production React application is that it will need Redux at some point. It’s much more efficient to start the React project with Redux, than trying to bolt on Redux after React project is underway after a while. Redux Toolkit does make things bit easier.

It’s like how React pretends that JSX is optional, when we all know JSX is requirement in React projects.

Thanks for all the work on Redux and Redux Toolkit.