It looks like you're bucketing the ideas in the post into one of two categories. Either 1. Too obvious to write about or 2. Not a best practice because new ideas are always being introduced.
Regarding the first, those topics weren't obvious to everyone. Besides no one really benefits when posts are called out for this.
And re the second, these patterns have emerged from one year of maintaining a large app with a growing team. The points mentioned are tips for writing code so that your app will scale, not silver bullets for complex topics such as the general question how to write styles for React. The best practices mentioned in the post are just that, but they're not the only ones.
Use componentShouldUpdate well: yes, do. You'll know why you should, quickly enough.
State v.s. props is a great point, but then you need both declarative managed injection via props to initialize or control, mixed with a transient stateful interactivity when the user begins free interactions. Early experiments in "best practices" are efforts like React-Controllables, trying to create components which are isomorphic to state v.s. props driving them.
Everyone is doing their own experiments with how and where data lives and how and where it gets there. That's the nature of webdev, experimenting with pipes. Some cursory words on Flux in your article indicate how vastly unresolved and mysterious the ???->data part of the webapp equation is. "We're experimenting with something Relay like". So way Soundcloud in 2012. Best practice: use react for the next step, data->html.
Best practice: wrap the most boring boilerplate css with your own react components. Oh great, just what everyone needs to go do. Recommendation is to not rely a lot on css, but how, if not global, do we start sharing some style rules effectively? It's disingenuous to offer this as settled "be balanced" best practice, particularly when it's still the hay days of excitement, with new encompassing visions like https://github.com/petehunt/jsxstyle/ just popping up.