I don't think anyone is saying people who know just enough jQuery NEED to know about React, just like jQuery, React is just another tool. To address your points though, React is "A javascript library for building user interfaces", it wasn't developed to be a tool to manage data flow patterns, it was built solely as a view library. Most people pick up jQuery as a means of manipulating their views/the dom so the target audience of both libraries as well as their use cases is very similar. Now I'm not saying the same thing will happen with React, but not too long ago people were saying the exact same thing about jQuery when it was introduced.