I don't think this article is well written, it doesn't really articulate a point other than it's not PHP because

> we've developed solid principles for building UIs

There's not really any substance to this statement or the paragraph it's in. I would skip this article entirely, and I think a much more profound view of this concept is "Mind the Gap" talk by Ryan Florence about dissolving the concept of the network and explicit code needed to manage that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqhE-CepH2g

I am also miffed that the criticizers of React = PHP are often Rails developers who completely overlook that Rails is PHP on cocaine, it is implicit, untraceable database calls sprinkled across templates, and the more use the worse it gets and it quickly becomes un-optimizable. At least with React API calls are explicit, not magic!