For sure. I've found getting that to work with a rails stack & webpack setup to be rather challenging. react_rails is pretty straight forward, but then you have a lot of global react components, and it gets trickier to leverage NPM. With webpack there's react_on_rails which is a sizable & complex gem, but it does work.

While I wouldn't use vanilla rails & UJS much today, I still think it has value in getting things going.