Minimal requirements to create a custom component

I've been reading the docs all day on creating a custom component. I've also looked at grapesjs-mjml for an example. I'm trying to create a base type for react components that can be extended as needed, but at the moment all I want to see is which lifecycle methods are called and when. I'm trying to work out the difference between render and toHTML specifically. I've created just a bare bones component with some logging, and it doesn't seem to be working. Here is my code I'm passing a React component as the content, which I expect not to render currently, but I'm not getting a single log in m...