I will offer my own anecdote. I started learning react "the idiot way". Made my own state/stores, wired them up with little functions that my components called,

I will offer my own anecdote. I started learning react "the idiot way". Made my own state/stores, wired them up with little functions that my components called, directly included react file as a script tag, and made our first React project -- an analytics dashboard. Now we have refactored everything and re built a large portion of our front end stack using react/redux/es6, but that first "react for idiots" project I think was an important learning step.