I fear that by the time I'm good enough at react, another library will come out
Eh, React is 5 years old. I've been writing it professionally for 3. I'm not worried.
And honestly -- React doesn't have the same pain points jQuery/Backbone/Angular1 did where I couldn't wait to move on after 6 months. We'd have to see an absolutely massive paradigm shift before I'd regret writing my apps in React.
I feel this way about React but Redux seems awkward and worthy of replacement. Am I in the minority on this?
There are tons of options for State Management before you even need Redux.
Check out:
Context API: https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html
Unstated: https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated