React is most useful if you have really complex state that you're trying to manage and reason about. It's probably overused because people who don't need it are

React is most useful if you have really complex state that you're trying to manage and reason about. It's probably overused because people who don't need it are just doing whatever's trendy without understanding trade-offs, but it's a godsend for UIs that need hundreds of components, persistent state, etc. IMO people often add Redux to it before a project really needs it. There's no need to mix markup and logic, a good pattern is to have dumb components that just translate state into markup, and keep your logic elsewhere. Modern javascript (and typescript) is a joy to program in and has greatly improved my productivity. Having to compile it with babel is a small price to pay.