It’s definitely not functional reactive programming, which needs to expose events and the history of events as first-order primitives, and usually a library of operations over the history of events.
If you simplify out the event stream primitive from FRP, what you are left with is not FRP.
Yes, as stated in the doc: "cells is a simplified Functional & Reactive (but not strictly FRP) library".
There were enough true FRP libraries around not to implement another one.
We think cells is a sweet spot where we get most of the benefits of functional programming and reactive programming while simplifying the concepts from the original paper from Elliott and Hudak.
If you simplify out the event stream primitive from FRP, what you are left with is not FRP.