It's not really a bug for the same reasons that jQuery implements focus/blur independently from focusin/focusout. focus events just don't bubble out natively so you have to make your synthetic event system do that if you want / need it. jQuery implements it as a separate pair of events, React chose not to / only deviates from DOM behavior in very few instances (onchange). Using jQuery was just easier for my use case which seemed too exotic to claim any kind of general relevance.