This has got to be gaslighting at the highest level: oh you're doing something wrong because that's not how you're supposed to do it in React. Not since Java's Spring have I encountered such weird zealotry for a relatively mediocre (but widely popular) framework.
Too many folks' livelihoods depend on it at this point. The other side of the same coin is the gaslighting that you can't build anything sufficiently complex without react. If you did build it without react, it obviously wasn't sufficiently complex.
I'd suggest thinking about dismantling your framework if you've been happy with it for a bit. If you've been rewriting or authoring large chunks and disabling features it might be informative to spend a slow day looking at what you've found useful.
