Navigating the items in the DropDownList by the first letter of the item is something that is supported by the KendoUI for jQuery DropDownList. 

In this demo, you can see the behavior for the Categories field. When Categories has focus, you can type "c" and it navigates to the first "c" category "Condiments". If you type "c" a second time, it navigates to "Confections".

https://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/dropdownlist/index

We have replaced some of our pages that used to use KendoUI for jQuery with React pages using Kendo React, and we are getting user complaints that this behavior is no longer supported for our drop downs.

I understand that we can use the "filter" functionality for the Kendo React DropDownList, but we would rather have the previous "first letter navigation" functionality supported by Kendo React.