You can however use React to build (static) websites, and it works really well for two reasons:
* You now have a uniform way of generating HTML, whether your project is highly interactive or not.
* In very basic terms it is a highly productive template system that is easily and gradually extendable with interaction and UI state if needed.
The author suggests that you typically just need HTML and CSS and a bit of JS to generate simple/static websites. This is just not true. If someone is paying you to create a website, you certainly need some way of decomposing a design (-system) into reusable parts that are fed with data from somewhere. So you end up with a template engine + the above things. React solves this problem right off the bat. It is really easy to use it that way and the only leap from a more traditional template engine is syntax and composability.
There are a lot of good alternatives worth considering. Just don't compare it to "just" HTML/CSS/JS because on that front it is simply superior in almost every way imaginable.
* You now have a uniform way of generating HTML, whether your project is highly interactive or not.
* In very basic terms it is a highly productive template system that is easily and gradually extendable with interaction and UI state if needed.
The author suggests that you typically just need HTML and CSS and a bit of JS to generate simple/static websites. This is just not true. If someone is paying you to create a website, you certainly need some way of decomposing a design (-system) into reusable parts that are fed with data from somewhere. So you end up with a template engine + the above things. React solves this problem right off the bat. It is really easy to use it that way and the only leap from a more traditional template engine is syntax and composability.
There are a lot of good alternatives worth considering. Just don't compare it to "just" HTML/CSS/JS because on that front it is simply superior in almost every way imaginable.