This chimes with my experience after 2 years of React dev I like it, it's fine, but on most projects I haven't really needed it and have found the tooling overhead can become quite onerous.
Right now, for me, the main reason for choosing React on a project is staffing; the availability of enthusiastic devs is a major plus point. The flip side of this is it feels a bit like hiring JS devs 10 years or so ago at the height of jQuery's popularity -- you get people who can churn out decent code in that paradigm but will often miss easier ways to do things that rely on an understanding of the underlying technologies.
I worry that the underlying tooling and technologies for React too are far removed from most React devs daily experience, that because of this they won't make that transition to greater understanding. There's often ~one person on a React team who understands the build pipeline and that's a problem Have you ever come to a project and found an x-hundred line web pack config file? Yikes! Those things can be hard to un-pack and figure out what every piece is doing and why.
Right now, for me, the main reason for choosing React on a project is staffing; the availability of enthusiastic devs is a major plus point. The flip side of this is it feels a bit like hiring JS devs 10 years or so ago at the height of jQuery's popularity -- you get people who can churn out decent code in that paradigm but will often miss easier ways to do things that rely on an understanding of the underlying technologies.
I worry that the underlying tooling and technologies for React too are far removed from most React devs daily experience, that because of this they won't make that transition to greater understanding. There's often ~one person on a React team who understands the build pipeline and that's a problem Have you ever come to a project and found an x-hundred line web pack config file? Yikes! Those things can be hard to un-pack and figure out what every piece is doing and why.