Comment by snapetom

Shiny is a great package. Not unlike R (and PHP back in the day) it was made by people that were not necessarily great programmers who wanted something to get up and running quickly. Lowering the bar to entry made sacrifices to performance, security, and consistency. However, you can punch above your weight class if you're a researcher who barely knows R and Python with Shiny.

That being said, if you're investing time to learn React and dealing with all its pitfalls to use with R, you might as well just go all in with React at that point.