I think the problem is not so much with the React architecture, but with the culture of JavaScript, which:

* does a horrific job with documentation

* delivers millions of packages with demo-grade half-finished projects

* has tutorials which show basic functionality, without going into any sort of depth, which people glue together by pattern-matching

That doesn't work well in general, but for something as complex, deep, and, well, architected as React, it doesn't work at all. People really do need to understand reactive programming, functional programming, and deep concepts to handle React well. Resources to do that don't exist.

This is the claim for React's documnetation:

"The React documentation assumes some familiarity with programming in the JavaScript language. You don’t have to be an expert, but it’s harder to learn both React and JavaScript at the same time.

We recommend going through this JavaScript overview to check your knowledge level. It will take you between 30 minutes and an hour but you will feel more confident learning React." source: https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html

Really? Read that again. REALLY? Someone with 30-60 minutes JavaScript programming is expected to code in React?

That's the target audience of most of the docs, and nothing goes far enough to get people qualified to use the tools. It becomes a magical black box. The posts in this thread show this attitude too: "You don’t really need to understand how React works, you just need it to work"