I hear you on this. A lot of that stack is very new and still changes quickly enough that I have a hard time finding good examples to work from.

I've had a very hard time getting things like react+react-router+reflux to all work together as expected. It's not been super fun as a way of working.

And I dunno if your situation is the same as mine, but all the "contemporary" JS stuff I work with (react, etc) is for side work, that is, stuff that I am building explicitly because I want to play with the stack.

So the reaction that "you don't need all that" is probably missing the point (at least if your situation is like mine): I do things like that because I want to see how stuff works, and it's better than doing it on my $$$ projects.