The React bindings for TS are quite good--I used them every day, and they're solid.
As for a ground-up approach, the bindings for ReasonML-react show how much effort it takes to have strong functional typing for React: https://github.com/reasonml/reason-react
I believe that there will be an effort to rewrite React in ReasonML in the future by core members. The goal is the leverage the power of Reason to obviate some of the weird parts of the current React internals. /shrug
As for a ground-up approach, the bindings for ReasonML-react show how much effort it takes to have strong functional typing for React: https://github.com/reasonml/reason-react
I believe that there will be an effort to rewrite React in ReasonML in the future by core members. The goal is the leverage the power of Reason to obviate some of the weird parts of the current React internals. /shrug