I've tried it. And yes, I want full control. The abstractions mostly work, but when they don't -- there you are again, thinking about transitions in native JS again. What was the point?
I have quite a lot of history with native JS, but was happy to relinquish control to webpack/babel/react... not at first (had the same reaction as you do), but once I gave it a fair chance I discovered that things just work. Never had any problem with React not performing the way it should.