Even for dashboards or other cases where the React maximalists claim that application state is too complex, it is usually trivial to inline a bit of JSON representing the initial state and handle updates with Vanilla JS. For me, I appreciate that my pages can render with one single request. There's something deeply wrong when you have the entire browser API at your fingertips, yet include 10mb of dependencies. The browser is already a heavy piece of tech, yet the typical JS heavy page is larger than the equivalent static binary of a native application.

If you dont need two way data binding you can go quite far without React, using a single general dispatch function for one way data binding.

Few use cases need two way data binding, but under React every use case gets it.

IOW with React to get the 800lb gorilla attached to the entire jungle when all you wanted was a banana!