I'd recommend starting with mithriljs. The idea behind it is very similar to react for views. It's also vanilla JavaScript so you will probably have an easier job learning it.
I also think the OP should have a look at Mithril. When I was in his situation I also was overwhelmed by the tooling and boilerplate necessary for those other frameworks. But with Mithril I was able to start developing after skimming the docs for a few hours.
