tldr; React is a view renderer. It renders views. Getting data to and from those views not included. Navigation? Not included. Persistence? Not included. Styling? Not included. Why? It's just a view renderer, that is to say, it renders templates.

When the only thing your application shares with its dependencies is its view renderer, you're going to feel a lot of pain. This is one of the big reasons why I use Ember.js for complex web-frontends (though holla to phoenix live views). It's a framework-- it has all them pieces you need included in a sane way that's consistent.

Just my two cents...

P.S. If you write JavaScript UI code, and you want to like be better at it, go write native UI code. You'll learn soooo god damn much, write better JS, and understand a lot more about what the fuck all these pieces (like react) are actually doing (rendering UI, managing state, networking etc) in a sane curated (thanks Googs, Microsofties, and Apples) way.