As mentioned earlier, although React itself is quite simple, the ecosystem around it can be a little overwhelming. Tessa Thorton, a former senior front-end developer for Shopify, once wrote a blog post titled How to learn web frameworks (ux.shopify.com/how-to-learn-web-frameworks-9d447cb71e68) In it, she reminded us that "Frameworks don’t exist to impress people or make your life harder. They exist to solve problems."
This reminds me of the first ever application I ever built, a clone of Amazon. It was built completely in vanilla JavaScript and PHP because I didn't even know there were frameworks available! However, there was a piece of animation I couldn't get right, and after Googling a lot (and finding the paradise that is Stack Overflow), I ended up using jQuery.
For learning how to program, this was not...
