I've done a great deal of looking around... I could be off, but there seems to be a lack of authority on best practices for GSAP and react.
There once was a 'gsap-enhancer' (no longer supported) that enabled jQuery-like targeting of dom nodes and their children. Syntax was easy.
From looking around on the interwebs-- FindDOMnode() was once recommended for targeting... & then "ref='' " attrs (with it's callback feature--which is a bit above my paygrade to understand a