The React way to set which option is selected for a select box, is to set a special value prop on the itself, corresponding to the <
You can actually find the selectedOptions inside the target... no need to iterate over all the options. Let's imagine you want to send the values to an onChange function passed to your component as props: you can use the following function on the onChange of your multiple select.
onSelectChange = (e) => {
const values = [...e.target.selectedOptions].map(opt => opt.value);
this.props.onChange(values);
};