I agree, though I've found that the animation story with React for anything even mildly complex is still pretty terrible. My day job is building big data visua

I agree, though I've found that the animation story with React for anything even mildly complex is still pretty terrible. My day job is building big data visualization applications with lots of D3 and React, so I have a lot of opinions about this. If you can get away with using CSS transitions or react-motion in your app, and you don't need D3's enter-update-exit selections, I feel React's declarative syntax is a much simpler mental model and is consistent with how the rest of my app works. But anything complex you'll need to drop out of React and build your DOM in D3, which has a very different notion of element lifecycles than React and doesn't allow you to reuse any of your other React components.