You know what really pisses me off about the dev community is the circle jerk that ensues when someone bashes something they have no experience in. Take yesterday's React bash on Reddit and DevRant. Thomas Fuchs compared React and JSX to the intermingling of HTML CSS and JS of 15 years ago. If you knew anything about React or spent 1 hour learning what it's about you would immediately know why that isn't true but no, a giant circle jerk ensued comparing it to PHP! I'm sorry but HOW can you compare a pure JS view library that is renderable by the browser, to a full fledged server side language?? Not to mention the React approach uses a completely different programming paradigm of functional programming.

When I first saw React and Redux I realized what this is all really about, a shift in the paradigms of programming. React + Redux is the first time that functional programming has entered mainstream. We've had functional programming available to us via Haskell and more recently Clojure for a while now but it was never very obvious how powerful functional programming could be outside of the niche that used it for more analytical type tools. Now we have things like hot reloading (https://youtube.com/watch/...) and state playback (https://youtube.com/watch/... skip to ~3min to watch the magic) thanks to immutable state.

Before you decide that React is just another flavor of the month library I encourage you to learn about the advantages that functional programming provides (https://medium.com/@cscalfani/...) and checkout Elm (http://elm-lang.org/) as well. The nice thing about React + Redux is that it gives us a way to start programming functionally, without having to learn ML style syntax like Elm and ClojureScript. Keep in mind, when Object Oriented Programming was becoming popular it was widely controversial as well and look at all it has done for us.