The problem is the low level tooling around it. This is what we’re trying to fix with this project. Hopefully you’ll give it a go, and maybe it will give you just as much enjoyment as using <script> tags. If not, please let us know how we can improve.
It’s not linting/transpilation/bundling that’s bad, it’s that it’s hard to do them without shooting yourself in the foot.
From there it's easy to think about everything in terms of JavaScript, and not making the Web the intended target for usage.
When doing a SPA I often set up Node.js to serve the index and provide server-side rendering and then never touch it again. Any actual API/WebSockets/RPC interfaces the app needs can be serviced by any plain old Ruby, Python, PHP, etc app backend. Since I usually use PHP from old habits, I use a Symfony API-only application.
I posted about this in a top level comment, but don't forget React can control any element in your DOM and not just the entire body like most SPA's are setup. You can continue using whatever languages/frameworks templating and view systems and augment views as needed that would be better handled by React.
That being said, I'll likely give this a spin tonight for somerandomcrappyidea.js and provide you guys some feedback. Unfortunately, my work at Google has me more focused on Angular so I don't have as much time as I'd like to work on React applications. =<
As an aside, thanks for the work you've done on Redux and the talk that you gave at Hack Reactor!
Do you remember how you were telling people on Twitter that they don't need every single crazy feature and every single thing in the Redux store (or even Redux at all) to do React? The kind of people I am complaining about are the ones that say the opposite.