> I prefer to be able to do anything I want with the GUI

I didn't say you don't need to stop doing "complex GUIs". What I'm challenging is the assertion that "Complex GUI's will inevitably have complex nested structures". This is not true IME.

> The complexity of GUI and the complexity of dataflow should be completely independent.

And this is exactly what my suggested method achieves. But I'm doing this by going one step further and decoupling the visuals from the component hierarchy. I'm still separating parts of the page into components, I'm just using an alternative to deep hierarchies, and forcing myself to have better reusable abstractions rather than single-use components. I do this with richer primitive components and layout components. That's it.

> Isn't it better to have components also independent of logic and side effects?

This is exactly what I am proposing. What I propose requires keeping logic and side effects from the reusable components. All I'm saying is that the logic shouldn't be distributed among multiple small components, because there's no intermediate layers with single-use components. If you do this, there's no need to worry about the organization you complain about.

In a gist, it's more "Philosophy of Software Design" and less "Clean Code", but applied to React.