You don't need any of that if you just use React. All you need is `setState()`. All of those extra things you are thinking about are part of Redux, not React. I love Redux, but even just pure React is a huge improvement over UIKit.

UIKit kind of reminds me of Backbone.js - it has some infrastructure but its up to you to build a lot of the tools yourself. You might prefer that personally, but I think the movement of the frontend community from Backbone to React shows that most developers prefer a more full feature solution.