I'm not sure how you'd implement scales, color theory, etc.. in React (a rendering library). There are a lot of useful parts of d3 which have nothing to do with rendering to the DOM. In fact, React and D3 complement each other quite well (maybe that is what you were saying?).

D3 is slightly more verbose than the one liners, but with that I get complete control over the scales and appearance of my chart. In addition it's trivial to combine multiple charts in a single diagram.