This whole post is an anti-pattern and bad advice. It read as from someone who didn’t go through the growing pains of building complex websites.
This is how we started building websites until things started to break with side effects, conflicting class names, bad introspection etc. and React came to the rescue.
The pattern you want is progressive enhancement and your output to be clean, compact html that’s augmented by JS. Which means build step. Everything opposite to this article’s advice.
Building websites with React also has its pitfalls and using React means introducing a lot of complexity. If you aren't already using NodeJS on the backend, it's probably best to avoid ReactJS unless it's actually necessary.
This is how we started building websites until things started to break with side effects, conflicting class names, bad introspection etc. and React came to the rescue.
The pattern you want is progressive enhancement and your output to be clean, compact html that’s augmented by JS. Which means build step. Everything opposite to this article’s advice.