Wow, relax man! You don't have to defend redux with your life!
I have to work on a daily base with redux because almost every stupid company is using that nowadays. Some codebases are so horrific that I simply quit the job and find something better.
I actually said why it is poor in design: endless switch statements with reducers, do you think that is great design? Every component that wants to use a store needs to 'connect' to it with a higher order component, ever seen chains of hoc's and still know what's going on? Then you need to write time and time again mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps. Do you think that's great design? Even if there would be no other state management system yet, it still sucks. Even Dan Abramov says you probably don't need redux, still everyone is using it for the most simple apps.
You might want to use a router, well you're kinda locked into redux so you need redux-router. Example from the redux-router repo:
import React from 'react';
import { combineReducers, applyMiddleware, compose, createStore } from 'redux';
import { reduxReactRouter, routerStateReducer, ReduxRouter } from 'redux-router';
import { createHistory } from 'history';
import { Route } from 'react-router';
Redux is just one of the many flux implementations. Not the best, but a flavour that you may like or dislike. Unstated is a client store that is a wrapper around the new React Context API: unstated: https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated