People think React or similar SPA libraries are the way to do frontend development, so all frontend development seems to be React at this point.
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is the problem. Another new library / framework will not solve this.
Frontend dev should go for the bare minimum when designing web sites, only introduce libraries as they're needed -- and really think about whether they're really needed or not. They need to ask some questions like:
- Maybe you can roll your own specialized solution that'll be smaller and faster than a general solution?
- Does the thing you're working on need to be an SPA or does a good old multi-page web site be enough for your use case?
- If you need parts of your website to be interactive, can you only update that part (the "islands" approach) by hand instead of introducing a dependency to do that?
There is a lot of complexity going on in our field right now and not enough people seem to care about that. The complexity is needlessly inflating our application / web page sizes and reducing performance.
The point is that React has become the IBM of web app frameworks, in the "nobody got fired for using IBM" sense.
Your CTO, PM, frontend dev and DevOps people likely all have React experience under their belt. So it isn't surprising if React ends up becoming the framework of choice, simply because it will likely be faster to start with.
