(I spend all day in react and like it, but understand people’s reactions.)
React is basically: JSX, useEffect, useState(plus a couple more) and reconciliation. React is the result of a group of very talented people spending a lot of time thinking about what the core of a framework like this should be. There is a very good reason react doesn't have more bells and whistles, because it's basically at a local minimum(in terms of complexity). What we have are tiny, simple foundational building blocks from which we can build larger and more complicated abstractions. There is nothing else in this space that is as simple: Angular and Vue are both basically "react with more bells and whistles", and sveltejs requires an entire compiler and has its own share of problems.
To save you an hour or so of reading its guide, the only key difference between Mithril and React is how VDOM updates are handled. Mithril always renders the entire “v-screen” on any vnode-related event out of an assumption that it changed something and DOM shouldn’t be too large in its div size. You can take it down with e.g. heavy svgs, but that is also true for vue, react, whatever. No framework can compare tens of thousands of vdoms efficiently, it’s always >= O(n). These cases are handled by mounting sub-apps at these points, so that redraws don’t descend and events don’t bubble up. React also advises against that and suggests “windowing”, also a very fresh and interesting approach (for those of course who still aren’t aware that it’s called a scroll view controller and is the core of all desktop ui frameworks since circa 1990).
React is easily the simpler of the two, and Vue is the one that forces you to do things "its way" a lot more than React does.
If you're referring to being able to, say, interact with state by just mutating it.. well, that's because Vue has a built in reactive state system that works similar to Mobx.
In react, you can just use Mobx.. or recoil, or redux, or even your own custom state management system if you really wanted to(as long as it talks to react properly).. In vue? Maybe, sort of, but you've already bought into one heavy-handed abstraction which is their own reactive stack, so the best you can do is build on top of that.