It seems to me they're missing the point. The implementation of ng-repeat is quite complex, and if, for some reason, it doesn't do what you want and you decide

It seems to me they're missing the point. The implementation of ng-repeat is quite complex, and if, for some reason, it doesn't do what you want and you decide to write your own directive you have to deal with mutating the DOM in an efficient manner yourself. React on the other hand allows you to just generate your DOM structure and be fairly confident in it performing well by default.