My point isn't so much loading data from a remote endpoint, but setting state. As the doc you quote says: componentWillMount should not trigger rerendering, and should have the newest state in the render function.

But when you use Redux this isn't true! The first render will see the old state of the store even if you did changes to it right befofe. And then you immediately get a new rerender with the correct state. This cannot be fixed with how react-redux is currently implemented, and leads to subtle bugs, especially when unmounting and remounting stuff that tries to clear some state.

Edit: more details https://github.com/reactjs/react-redux/issues/210