No, react is not purely front-end. You can do server-side rendering (SSR) with react[0]. It can replace a view engine such as ejs or handlebars. The article me

No, react is not purely front-end. You can do server-side rendering (SSR) with react[0]. It can replace a view engine such as ejs or handlebars. The article mentions that the HTTP framework "hapi" was replaced with "spife". So yes, they changed the backend and the frontend at the same time. [0]: github.com/styfle/react-server-example-tsx