Kind of, although last time I checked React devs were the only ones not keen in moving into Web Components, while everyone else is moving into that direction.

It looks like people are wrapping WebComponents with React, but isn't that the wrong direction? From what I understand, since React's rendering has been abstracted, we'd just need ReactWebComponents instead of ReactDOM, where the rendering engine directly utilizes WebComponents and its native Shadow DOM implementation.

Quite right.

I must admit that I am not a React fan though, and do favour vanilajs.

Yeah, and it's great! Can't wait for Edge and Safari support and further maturation.

Apparently WebKit had this nearly two years ago: https://webkit.org/blog/7027/introducing-custom-elements/

Actually Safari has been supporting this for over a year already :) Edge is probably coming out this spring