FWIW the creator of react, Jordan Walke is a lot more along the lines of what you had imagined the react team to be like. He is a massive proponent of ML and is

FWIW the creator of react, Jordan Walke is a lot more along the lines of what you had imagined the react team to be like. He is a massive proponent of ML and is currently working on (also the creator of) ReasonML, a new syntax for OCaml, and react in ReasonML. I think there’s an interesting point in there as to the attributes needed to build something new vs scale something existing to a new level. They’re both clearly great at the things they seem to prefer doing.