When the grid is being initiated, the columns passed into the grid as children will be filtered by "child.type === GridColumn" to check whether it is indeed a GridColumn. With React Hot Loader, each React element will be modified to be a ProxyFacade, and the Grid will not recognize its children anymore.
The React Hot Loader already supports a built-in cold method that will not wrap certain components to be ProxyFacade. https://github.com/gaearon/react-hot-loader/blob/75d07d606263394edd4e86448e489104203a3991/README.md#disabling-a-type-change-%EF%B8%8F Call the cold method on the used Kendo UI for React component and it should work as expected with React Hot Loader.
I also, have the same issue, the issue as I can interpret is that, the grid doesn't render when it's wrapped around the react hot loader, appcontainer, when i unwrap it, it displays properly.