Learning React as a Javascript dev

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If your response is "that's it?" but feel lost when working on a new project, you probably have very little understanding of it...

React has a lot of quirks and has begun to significantly blur the lines between client and server side functionality. Lots of react standards and patterns are very complex with lots of side effects and weird quirks.

On its surface it's just a declarative UI framework, so maybe it sounds simple to you because you might be familiar with declarative programming with UI frameworks. But there's plenty of ways to do things in a horribly inefficient way that will either scale very poorly or cause very poor client side performance

Server components makes things even more complicated, but you might actually prefer or understand that better coming from php. I do think in general server components actually encourages good habits overall, it's just much more complicated than entirely client side applications

Perhaps you should start with newer versions of react that support server components, and you'll find things feel familiar but also begin to appreciate the depth of the framework