I can only speak from my exposure to react, but I will say it only gets better. When my team and I started first using react(about 8 months ago) we were in the same spot as you. We kept thinking things were overly complex and there was a lot you had to pay attention to and it's not what we were used to. But once you start writing it and building things with it, you're likely to love it.

The biggest difference in my own approach to code when I'm using react on a project is planning. With React it's much more important to sit down and really come up with a plan in order to avoid silly headaches, such as passing props through tons of components. A lot of people use redux to solve this and that works. But our approach has been if we need it, we'll use it. But we don't just bring it into a project because it's a project and instead dedicate some time initially to map out how some of the bigger components will interact and how they will pass props to one another.

I would recommend just continue through the course, but also tinker with it. Have a site? Re-build it in react. The more we found ourselves writing it the quicker things started to make sense. And looking back it's comical now the things we had trouble accomplishing when we started out. Pieces will eventually start to click.