I also don't like magic, but React is the wrong definition of magic in this case. It's an abstraction layer for UI and one that is pretty simple when you think about it conceptually. The complexity is by third party library that are building on top of it, but proposing complex machineries instead of simple ones. Then you have a culture of complexity around simple technology.

But it does seems that culture of complexity is more pervasive lately. Things that could have been a simple gist or a config change is a whole program that pulls tens of dependencies from who knows who.