I've been working with React almost exclusively for 2-3 years (I do occasionally experiment with Vue, or work with Backbone). Once you get used to thinking in React, it makes projects like this really easy; the data flow never got complicated, even though I'm not using any other "state management" library (don't believe the "React is just the V in MVC" saying!).

If you're interested in getting started with React, I wrote a "no fluff" blog post: https://hackernoon.com/simple-react-development-in-2017-113b...

My goal with the post was to cut out everything unnecessary, and focus on getting the user to build something with React with as little time/effort as possible. React now comes with an amazing build system that abstracts away all the configuration, but a lot of folks starting out don't know that, and wind up spending a week tinkering with Webpack and Babel and build config, and installing and learning dependencies they don't need.