> so they just added so much abstraction they had to use hacks to pre-render it on the server"

Actually, you have that exactly backwards. It's only because of React's abstraction of the DOM that it's even possible to render using a simple JavaScript interpreter running on the server side.

You do understand that server-side rendering is not (typically) necessary, right? I mean, React will render just fine initially on the browser, of course. It's only done (wisely) on the server before serving to the client for performance reasons.