I think if we're talking about concepts at the level of OOP, we'd be comparing MVU and virtual DOMs rather than React. I learned to write UIs in F# through Elmish (used by Bolero), which was inspired by (unsurprisingly) Elm. React, also being inspired by Elm, was simple enough to transition to once I was comfortable in Bolero. It was basically MVU with components that have local state and lifetime function callbacks. I ended up tripping over TypeScript/JS more often than React

At the same time, I do know what you mean about the walled garden ecosystems. It seems unfortunate that every framework I pick up, I'm learning a new set of components everyone uses for things like virtualization. On the backend it feels less common to be using a library that's only relevant to your stack, and when there's a killer library in another language, you don't need to move mountains to use it.