React is a JavaScript library that forces you to think in terms of components. This model of thinking fits user interfaces well. Depending on your background it might feel alien at first. You will have to think very carefully about the concept of state and where it belongs.
Because state management is a difficult problem, a variety of solutions have appeared. In this book, we’ll start by managing state ourselves and then push it to a Flux implementation known as Alt. There are also implementations available for several other alternatives, such as Redux, MobX, and Cerebral.
React is pragmatic in the sense that it contains a set of escape hatches. If the React model doesn’t work for you, it is still possible to revert back to something lower level. For instance, there are hooks that can be used to wrap older logic that relies on the DOM. This breaks the abstraction and ties your code to a specific environment, but sometimes that’s the pragmatic thing to do.