Wow! I am not developing with React on the daily basis, but I see interesting consequences of this FSA analogy. FSAs are closely connected with regular grammars (think regular expressions) and regular languages, which are less expressive than say context free grammars, etc (refer to Chomsky hierarchy). In itself it does not mean anything, but what you describe basically mean that React moves towards separating Turing complete data manipulation from much simpler automata.

And this is even "cooler" than functional programming: It's declarative programming.

If this development continues, React will become a mostly declarative code plus some scripts.

But wait... That is how HTML started: javascript was just a little addon back then. Here the power is in the dynamical data processing though, more like Excel spreadsheet...