it's also impossible to look at the DOM and figure out what the hell is going on with React.

React has excellent dev tools of its own that cover this.

I have those dev tools installed. I wouldn't call them "excellent".

Agreed I might have gone too far with "excellent". :) I think they do a good job though at operating at the level of abstraction React lives at, which generally requires less detail to live in the DOM (e.g. ids/classes used only for JS bindings compared to classic jQuery soup).