Yep. I think a large part of Redux's success is the genius decisions that Dan and Andrew made during its initial development. Keep the core API minimal, apply functional programming principles where possible, and provide primitives and hooks that allow others to build extensions for their own specific use cases. (The fact that they're both extremely nice and well-respected people doesn't hurt either :) )

IMHO, Redux introduced a gamechanging concept no other JS library has done before (at least not in this big way): Single and immutable state object. This fact alone makes the developer experience significantly better, both in shorter debugging time (and less bugs to begin with) and piece of mind that the code works as intended.

what about elm? didn't redux just take basic concepts from elm and implemented them in vanilla js? Not saying that Dan didn't do amazing work anyway.

The greatness of Redux comes from it's blinding simplicity.

It is the kind of simplicity that I am happy to use the word genius to describe.