"One taste of React in front of WP-API, and I reckon the jQuery and Backbone era will be finished."
This seems to me like a bit of an exaggeration (or maybe just facetious).
This seems to me like a bit of an exaggeration (or maybe just facetious).
But all of the benefits of the React Virtual DOM don't really come into play if the content is static (like most WordPress sites). If no data is changing, you don't need observables to automatically update views, and the built in underscore.js templating will do a fine job.