Yielding to that temptation has become ever more frequent; nowadays it is standard practice. Modern proprietary software is typically an opportunity to be tricked, harmed, bullied or swindled.

In React 0.12 time frame we did a bunch of small changes to how key, ref and defaultProps works. Particularly, they get resolved early on in the React.createElement(...) call. This made sense when everything was classes, but since then, we've introduced function components. Hooks have also make function components more prevalent. It might be time to reevaluate some of those designs to simplify things (at least for function components).