As a solo developer trying to bootstrap a startup I started out 8 months ago with React, I have had a reasonably good experience with React itself. For a pre 1.0 project it's surprisingly stable and once you figure out what you're doing I've been able to move relatively quickly.
The big holdup has been the supporting libraries. Some have been an absolute mess but the solution to that is that once I got it working, just don't touch it and don't buy into the promises that it's always going to be the next version that solves the issues. I didn't opt for Redux and went with Fluxxor instead which has worked reasonably well but I kept getting errors and ended up forking it to fix the problem. I'm not going to go back and use Redux for everything because someone told me it's better.
I am now on my 3rd build tool over this timeline. I am now on Webpack because people kept promising that the next one would be better. I struggled to finally get React-Hotloader to work and occasionally it works but most of the time I just get Invariant Violation errors and have to do a full reload. I had to jump through hoops to get this to work and enable CORS etc for virtually no benefit. It will almost certainly be my last build tool for a while.
The pattern with JS from my viewpoint has been to overhaul entire libraries because it's not quite right. It seems that what these developers don't realize is that when you solve one problem you often introduce another. Once you have a working solution there isn't really much incentive to change things. This guy laments that there is not a good way to do pure JS instead of JSX but you know what? JSX is fine. I already need a build tool to use ES6, and as long as you are consistent you shouldn't run into too many issues using the pure JS solution that comes with React if that's what you really want to do. JSX might be ugly but I would rather just deal with the ugliness and settle for good enough then keep creating extra work for myself in search of perfect.
My goal is to build an app. I don't have the time or inclination to try out libraries like cycle or elm every time someone brags about how perfect they are just because they might provide me with a little benefit in terms of ease of development. I am perfectly fine with sitting back and reaping the benefit of other peoples' WWE-style back and forth even if I have to wait a year or more for things to stabilize.
