I don't see how it is trying to be React; It definitely tries to use concepts from HTML and CSS (and perhaps even some JS?), but I actually found that it allowed me to move very quickly as I didn't need to learn a whole new UI system from scratch. I didn't need to create any component of my own, and CSS is something I already know. If anything, like I wrote in another comment, the slight layout differences and deviation from CSS is what sometimes got me a little confused.