I think the number of concepts that need to be understood to be an efficient React developer has grown over the years just enough that it has become slightly frustrating to learn. It is still presented as a very simple small surface area framework but there's a lot of subtly with how many new concepts need to be understood now like hooks as an example. I think it just crossed a threshold and became less intuitive and more tiresome as a result unless you are embedded in React land and do React stuff all the time.