Interesting approach. But if you are developing a client-side app (React) and server-side (Rails) is just being used for data — why “integrate” (stuff) React into Rails? Why not develop them separately and use CORS (https://github.com/cyu/rack-cors)?

The benefits of this approach are as follows:

1. You would be using React ecosystem instead of fighting with asset-pipeline, turbolinks and friends…
2. If at some point you want to swap out Rails for another backend (say node.js) — you can

I believe this approach will become more and more popular now that Rails 5 came out with an API-only “mode” (http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/api_app.html).