Ryan Vannin presents on using WordPress 4.7's REST API together with React to build custom themes. He discusses setting up the basic structure with functions.php, fetching data from WordPress endpoints using Redux and Ducks modules, and implementing routing and internationalization. While this allows building feature-rich JavaScript themes, it requires knowledge of both JavaScript and PHP. Integration of certain features like routing and multi-language support is complicated. The result is a large bundle size that may negate performance benefits.