I don't know. Being neither a web developer nor a frontend specialist (my professional development days are long behind me and were mostly spent on real time systems in Ada with some UI work using Qt), I recently developed a small site using react and redux. I chose the stack for fun but I found the experience a lot nicer than all my previous forays into web development. It felt a lot cleaner than what I was expecting. I think the stack pushes you in a clear direction regarding architecture and to me it seemed to make things simpler rather than more complicated.
That’s exactly why many of us use it, without giving much thought to the idea that it’s heavy or slow (which really makes me wonder what the hell some people are doing with their React apps...)
The developer ergonomics, and the mental models which it prescribes - which are why I’d argue it’s actually a framework and not just a library, but that’s semantics - are really well thought out and can make you very productive.
If I want to build a static site with minimal fuss I might still use something like HTML, Sass and vanilla JS with Parcel. For pretty much everything else React has become a default.
