@twostepsbehind React is a javascript frontend mostly used to build PWA or SPA applications, Wordpress would be used as the backend (PHP) to serve json over api requests, unless you have a lot of knowledge with javascript i wouldn't advise you try to use React because you could leave your application wide open to exploits given you will be serving sensitive data over an API to the javascript frontend.
I use react, Vue, and Angular a lot in development and i mostly serve a static index.html page which pulls in the react app from something like AWS Cloudfront (Serverless) and i use something like Django, PHP or NodeJs as the backend to handle the api requests... These technologies are perfect for building Mobile apps or component-driven applications which can be very overwhelming for someone new to coding.
For example with React you would split your entire application into components that can be reused in any template or module over and over again, an example of this would be a ButtonComponent so you dont need to constantly keep writing the same HTML and CSS/SAS for a button element and instead you would do something like this and pass properties to the component...
Code:
<Button size="small" colour="primary">
Submit
</Button>
Once you get familiar with how components work and interact with each other you can quickly scale out an application without re-writing the same html over and over again... Then in the future lets say you want to add another colour to your buttons, instead of having to go back over your application and change the class in every page/template that had that horrible button html... You simply edit the ButtonComponent and add another property or class... I love javascript frontends because they are so powerful but there is a lot to it and can be very overwhelming.
So what would be an ideal starting point?
I would recommend you try something like Wordpress or a MVC framework (Model, View, Controller) which can be much easier to learn, i would also turn to Youtube and Udemy for help... i constantly use google searches and youtube when developing because you never stop learning
