Various ways to use React with Rails

I’ve spent the last few days reading about the various ways to use Ruby on Rails and React together to to build a web application. During my bootcamp I learn how to use Rails in a couple of different ways to build apps, first in a standard Rails only MVC style and then coupled with React using Rails as a backend API. I’d become curious if anyone has since developed a more integrated way to work with Rails and React together, rather than basically having 2 seperate apps working together. I found 2 other solutions which enable the use of React components with .erb files, allowing you to render JavaScrpit and React components directly in your Rails view files. Initially, I was drawn to the idea of working more heavily with Rails as my development tool rather than leaning on React. There are at least 2 people gems which are used to achive this functionality, react-rails and react_on_rails. Both of these gems use Babel to convert the jsx into erb, they differ in the ways that the views are eventaully rendered. The problem, however, is that I personally find this reduction in seperation of concerns to be less desireable. I kept finding myself trying to recreate the flow that create-react-app sets up out of the box. While I’m still not exactly sure which way is more performant, the Rails API method seems to be the most modular and scalable.

-Rails API -React on Rails -react-rails