I think what OP and others are talking about when they refer to React as being the view part of model-view-controller is that a server might render a React component in the view layer after the controller has decided what data to collect and which layout to use.
I think something other people sometimes talk about are single-page applications, in which case it's not a single component being rendered but an entire application. At that point MVC was simply disregarded by the developers because React is really just trying to be the V in MVC.
That would be what is known as the template layer, not the view layer. If we're just randomly making up definitions for MVC, then sure, anything goes. But as nobody has provided the the arbitrary definition they just came up with off the top of their head, surely we're sticking with the standard Smalltalk usage?
I think something other people sometimes talk about are single-page applications, in which case it's not a single component being rendered but an entire application. At that point MVC was simply disregarded by the developers because React is really just trying to be the V in MVC.