It seems a lot of people like to say React is just the V in MVC. Even Facebook focus on this as the first comment on the React home page, “Lots of people use React as the V in MVC”.
Update: After a tweet from Dan Abromov and some feedback, the React documentation regarding “V in MVC” has been changed.
Dan Abromov (now working at Facebook on React) from “You’re Missing the Point of React”
At the time, downplaying React’s role in application architecture was intentional because React already had too many “seemingly bad” ideas to risk alienating people by adding some more.
And linking to this discussion where Christopher Chedeau (also known online as Vjeux and a Facebook employee working on React)
React architecture is based on components that, as you say, can take the role of Views and Controllers. But instead of having a clear separation between those two concepts, they are blended together. Leaf components are going to be mostly views, and as you go up the hierarchy they are going to look more and more like controllers. The hard separation appears on the component boundaries and not between V and C.
and
Since we want people to try it out, we downplayed the C important in our marketing talks. We are already challenging the idea of templates, we can’t fight all the fronts at once
Unfortunately this seems to have caused some confusion and I’ve seen people dismiss React or talk about it without understanding React because of this.