You make valid points and, in general, the top-down prop passing convention is the recommended approach with React. This works well if most of your state can be

You make valid points and, in general, the top-down prop passing convention is the recommended approach with React. This works well if most of your state can be managed client-side with, e.g., Flux stores. There are some cases, though, such as large scale paginated data sets, that require out-of-band requests to a service (even if they are managed through stores). This is the case that's problematic. For these components, I just render out scaffolding and a loading indicator. Thanks for the recommendation. The only reason for jQuery is the occasional external dependency and the XHR wrapper.