No, I'm not a web developer. I've tried reading some React articles. There are lots of points that are brought up again and again (diffing for minimal incremental updates, unidirectional flow, etc) that I find really hard to care about since I've never encountered them in the kind of native development I do.
Just because you aren't a web developer doesn't mean you can't dabble in web development. Take 30 mins to play with their starter kit [1] or just play around inside JSFiddle [2]. Now imagine being able to encapsulate your native components the same way.
IMO encouraging you to isolate state management is the biggest win. JSX and component-based abstraction are really fucking powerful too though.
I believe the greatest benefit of react is that its javascript, html and a familiar framework. Outside of that, the diffing is only "good" now is because drawing is the bottleneck. Arguably, it may be possible to have a faster framework that doesnt need to iterate over every item in a list to check for item changes.
If you have junior devs, having them learn one framework would likely be far easier than different ones for different environments. Personally, I really enjoy thinking in react. Its opened my eyes up to opportunities, relation and application to Oop in general.
