I agree fully with [1], having recently experienced the pain of implementing a custom drag-and-drop UI in React.
I ended up using ref's heavily to avoid stale closure and async re-render issues. Which basically amounts to circumventing React and interacting with the DOM directly.
The article itself says that there are multiple meanings of "character". One of which refers to a persons reputation and can be traced back to "the Greek charassein, meaning “to sharpen, cut in furrows, or engrave.”
I ended up using ref's heavily to avoid stale closure and async re-render issues. Which basically amounts to circumventing React and interacting with the DOM directly.