Absolutely right. I covered this in a blog post I wrote over a year ago (which still applies today): http://hugogiraudel.com/2015/06/18/styling-react-components-...
Basically, it seems like everyone is talking about how amazing it is and how much it improves their productivity, and this makes me feel like there must be something I'm missing but I can't figure out what that is.
React's biggest advantage is really not the virtual DOM, but rather how it enables you to think about your application. The phrase "easy to reason about" is kind of overused by now, but there's a lot of truth to it. React encourages use of small components that can be composed together as needed, top-down data flow, and Functional Programming principles. Also, its rendering approach lets you think almost exclusively in terms of "given this state data, what do I want my UI output to look like?", rather than "_If_ this div was visible, I want to toggle it off when there was a click here, but only if..."-type transitions. Overall, that makes it a whole lot easier to understand what is going on inside the application.
There was a recent Reddit thread labeled "What were the biggest 'aha' moments you had in learning React?" ([0]), which has a lot of good comments. You might also be interested in reading through some of the posts on "Thinking in React" ([1]) out there, as well as some business case arguments for using React ([2]). Both those sections are part of my larger React/Redux links list ([3]), which has links to numerous tutorials, articles, and other resources on React.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/5gmywc/what_were_t...
[1] https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master...
[2] https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master...
