Absolutely, and it ignores that React has never been designed purely to render into the browser DOM as defined by the w3. The browser's DOM is simply one target, though certainly the most popular one. I use React every day for building other things: xml targets like PDFs, word docs, and SVGs, raw strings, canvases, native, etc. Far from a toddler's mistake, the team was well aware of this from the start, and the shift from everything in the 'react' package to splitting out 'react-dom' is clear evidence of this.

Components are a very powerful concept that goes way beyond the common scenario of building a web page and updating it with some data.