> but when I tried sprinkling a bit of react in my views

If you need only a sprinkling why not vanilla JS with Stimulus? Pulling in React for only a "sprinkling" seems like overkill.

The benefit of the current approach is that you can use any vanilla JS code, and it's especially easy if it uses ES Modules.

Also the whole point of React/Vue/Svelte is that they're all complete frameworks meant to do your whole UI. Using "just a sprinkling" of these seems like the worst of both worlds.

Dunno, my app pulls in a fairly heavy JS dependency (Echarts) and it took all of 2 minutes to set it up using Stimulus.