I've done similar things, and yeah, it's great for making quick-n-dirty utilities to poke around with your data & state handling code. You can even throw ugly non-React GUIs on top, trivially, including in something like Electron (if, say, your application needs access to functionality or modules not available on the Web, as could be the case for certain Javascript deployment targets like mobile, set-top boxes, desktop, server, and so on).