I'm not quite sure what your point is. You say that the only use of react is the virtual DOM, so is it just that React is a poor choice as a template engine? I

I'm not quite sure what your point is. You say that the only use of react is the virtual DOM, so is it just that React is a poor choice as a template engine? I'm not personally convinced, but that's a bit of personal preference I suppose. The modularization and composability of components is definitely nice, and not all template engines do this well. I could certainly see how you may disagree with me though. Is it that they aren't doing anything revolutionary? That's certainly true. It's relatively trivial to make a static site generator that uses React, and there's plenty of static site generators out there that use other engines. I think using webpack to bundle everything up is pretty nice though. Either way, my point wasn't that this project is particularly amazing, or useful, just that it works with JavaScript disabled.