I was more referring to the essentially mandatory third party packages that you need with react, react router, redux/whatever you please, something for your styles, something for forms etc. With angular you just use what comes out of the box, but either way you have to learn whatever the thing is so the effort seems to be the same. Not sure what you mean about abstraction and componentisation vs other frameworks.
I agree, the versioning has been a mess and they're constantly breaking changes to the API. Just trying to update a project is like trying to change playing cards in a house of cards...