What we don't want to happen is to bless an approach that inverts this control, allowing an arbitrary parent to impact the inner-workings of a component.

This would be a component that is meant to be styled by its parents, and it would make no logical sense to have every possible type of style available inside the Link component. If I wanted to turn one of these anchor tags into a button, another into a nav-link, and another into a footer link, I should be able to. There's no reason that there shouldn't be a feature to treat a component like a normal HTML element.

The custom code "fills in the blanks" for the framework, such as supplying a table of menu items and registering a code subroutine for each item

in traditional programming, the custom code that expresses the purpose of the program calls into reusable libraries to take care of generic tasks, but with inversion of control, it is the framework that calls into the custom, or task-specific, code.