As some people who have been paying attention said from day one: other than the component model and unidirectional data flow, what makes React stand out is that it's ultimately a way to describe a UI in terms of functions that output a component tree. Whether you apply that component tree to the browser DOM or use it to generate static markup makes no difference (or to glue together native components as with React Native).
A lot of the more complex features only make sense in an interactive context (i.e. when rendering in the browser) but React is a great choice for server-side rendering too. And unless your initial rendering logic is as complex as the Netflix landing page's and the interaction logic is as trivial, you can just hydrate what the server spits out and go on from there.
The difference is that historically we used one code base to generate the initial markup and another to breathe life into it. With React we can do both with the same code. And in this case Netflix just skips the client-side rendering in favour of a tiny bit of JS (which means they're still using the same language which is still better than the mess we had in the early '00s).
As some people who have been paying attention said from day one: other than the component model and unidirectional data flow, what makes React stand out is that it's ultimately a way to describe a UI in terms of functions that output a component tree. Whether you apply that component tree to the browser DOM or use it to generate static markup makes no difference (or to glue together native components as with React Native).
A lot of the more complex features only make sense in an interactive context (i.e. when rendering in the browser) but React is a great choice for server-side rendering too. And unless your initial rendering logic is as complex as the Netflix landing page's and the interaction logic is as trivial, you can just hydrate what the server spits out and go on from there.
The difference is that historically we used one code base to generate the initial markup and another to breathe life into it. With React we can do both with the same code. And in this case Netflix just skips the client-side rendering in favour of a tiny bit of JS (which means they're still using the same language which is still better than the mess we had in the early '00s).