Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
I cannot say for certain without more code, but you say "I take this navbar from the verticalnavbar class and throw it into the nav-links in my navbar class to provide a hamburger view." You should never directly manipulate the DOM like this in react, and depending on your approach to manipulating the DOM it is likely to cause issues you are seeing i.e: clicking the link does a full-refresh instead of a client navigation. This is because it's following the native browser behavior instead of the event handlers, as the event handlers are broken by the DOM manipulation The active class isn't applying as react is loosing track of the DOM nodes.
Full answer by Violet Rose: https://stackoverflow.stackexchange.com/a/80006545 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Need it done for your business? UphillTech.
