Indeed, it does. My experience visiting SPAs is frankly one of annoyance. Somehow, with 32GB of memory, dual SSDs and an i7 extreme processor, the browser grinds to a crawl with at least 1 CPU core maxed out for however long it takes for the extraneous (to me) transition/effect to complete. As a side effect the CPU fan kicks in for my auditory pleasure.
Compare that to a traditional web page where the browser only needs to handle a small fragment of html after initial page load, which typically makes for blazing fast page transitions, indistinguishable from SPA transitions.
I get the benefit of offloading work to the client when scalability is an issue, but for a static blog site? Not so much, I'd say using React in this case is less about the user experience and more about the developer's.