The trend to equilibrium for reaction-diffusion systems coming out of chemistry is investigated, in the case when reaction processes might happen only on some open subsets of the domain. A special case has been studied recently in [Desvillettes, L., \& Phung, K. D. (2022). Journal of Differential Equations, 338, 227-255] using log convexity technique from controllability theory, which in turn requires some amount of regularity for the solutions, and is difficult to generalise to more general systems. In this paper, we prove the convergence to equilibrium directly using vector-valued functional inequalities. One major advantage of our approach is that it allows to deal with nonlinearities of arbitrary orders, for which only global renormalised solutions are known to globally exist. For a specific situation where solutions are known to be bounded, we also prove the convergence to equilibrium when the diffusion as well as the reaction rates are degenerate. For this situation, we also treat the case of reactions happening in a set of strictly positive measure which may have an empty interior.