Agreed; of course there are tradeoffs! "What happens.." is that you can use Mobx instead of redux bc it's easier to reason about. You can have some preferred way of doing things, and let React be a component-level implementation detail. Pros and cons abound in choosing a bells-and-whistles, batteries-included framework vs taking on the overhead -- and upside -- of composing a set of preferred libraries or tools. I never said "React is always a better choice than X." I said "it's not apples:apples to compare them directly". For which I got downvoted? sigh