I think you can more easily convince me that D3 and React don't go together at all, because their models conflict, than that it makes sense to code directly to D3's guts and replace a lot of its logic with React's. But you all have more experience with this than I do (I've used both in anger independently, but not together).

There's a point in this article where they've replaced D3's axes code with a new React implementation. "Okay! So this is definitely more code. But that makes sense, since we're basically duplicating some of the d3 library code, in our own code base." I mean, yes. It makes sense. But it is, ceteris paribus, way worse than D3, where axes generation is kind of a fundamental basic idiom of the library, which we're here replacing with idiosyncratic new code.

I get that the code might be better in some other direction, but just as code, it's worse. The claim is that it's more readable, but: it's only more readable if you don't do a lot of D3. To me this is shades of people trying to talk about Lisp function names or APL or whatever.