React is bad is youre bad. Its much more fundamental than other frameworks. It also paradigms shifts from imperative to (more) functional. So if you are not comfortable with closures and side effects (like the author), you will get lost.
None of the pattern from any framework is new. Theres only so many ways to design systems, you either use callbacks, observers, or events. All have their pros and cons (where imo observers and events are inferior due to their quick branching factor in larger codebases). React gives the option to use any of these.