And does an equivalent in React work? Because I don't believe React does any of the papering-over you describe. My understanding (as a non-user) is that React does, logically, essentially nothing special around event handling.
In general React has its own event handling code. For one in React the user doesn't even deal with the browser native DOM events but React synthetic events. React also readily creates brand new synthetic events from other browser events. React also sometimes gives different names or behaviors to browser events; the most famous example is that the React onChange event is roughly equivalent to the browser onInput event, but absolutely different from the browser onChange event.