I think this post is spot on. I remember having a quick exploratory play with React back when the tutorial was like that and I thought it was great. Then when I came back to actually use React in a project the tutorial had changed and all of the sudden it felt like a big learning curve. Vue had just been adopted by Laravel and I was able to get everything I wanted to do by just including some scripts.

I've since learned more about compiling and including other resources so could probably handle the React tooling and requirements now but back when I started it was a big stumbling block.