It's suboptimal and obscure. There is barely any up to date resources on it.
So far I've managed to get to stuff presented on the window, but as soon as you start messing with references to the DOM components, things start to break down.
It's a shame, I really think Typescript and React would be the answer to getting a decent code base.
One of the cool parts, is that you get to define what your property is with static type checking and have no need to use Reacts on PropValidator.
let search = new SearchBox<{
options:SearchOptions,
onSearch:OnSearchHandler>
})
That tells you that the SearchBox props contains SearchOptions and a delegate to call when searching
I'm just starting with both React and TypeScript, so it could just be me.
I've worked on converting some of Reacts tutorial to TypeScript just to try it out. Here's some of the code, and it's not 100%. https://gist.github.com/seivan/c01a3b1173cd237b8531