Scroll to bottom of an overflowing div in React

I have a container that fills the height of the page. This container has display flex and flex direction column. Then I have a Messages component which is a ul with one li per message plus a special AlwaysScrollToBottom component as the last child that, with the help of useEffect, scrolls to the bottom of the list.

const AlwaysScrollToBottom = () => {
  const elementRef = useRef();
  useEffect(() => elementRef.current.scrollIntoView());
  return <div ref={elementRef} />;
};

const Messages = ({ items }) => (
  <ul>
    {items.map(({id, text}) => <li key={id}>{text}</li>)}
    <AlwaysScrollToBottom />
  </ul>
)

const App = () => (
  <div className="container">
    <Messages items={[...]}>
    <MessageComposer />
  </div>
)

The CSS is

.container {
  display: flex;
  height: 100vh;
  flex-direction: column;
}

ul {
  flex-grow: 1;
  overflow-y: auto;
}

MessageComposer has been omitted for brevity, it contains the form, the input field, etc. to send messages.