Is it? Because there is normally things like JSX, React Router, Redux and a lot of other stuff that you have to learn with it to build an application.
I've seen fairly decent backend developers having a right mare trying to get their head around just the npm tooling (no it isn't obvious if you haven't worked with it before).
People don't realise that there is a lot of the eco-system you have to learn just to do something fairly basic. You also have to unlearn things that you've done before elsewhere which itself can be difficult.
So I find this hard to believe.
Anyway this is going down the road of "why don't you use this it is easy?" which isn't the point I was originally making. I personally getting fed up of all the bloody tooling you have to learn to make something basic, when I can just ignore it and go back to basics.