People probably tell the shops to use it because they don't know anything else and lack fundamental understanding of programming which makes switching frameworks quite hard. I.e. job security for "React programmers".
Depends on the use case. For a lot of cases you may not need a framework at all. A library like jQuery to smooth out DOM API horrors is probably a good idea anyway.
I'm not too thrilled about Vue or svelte either. But there are differences. Vue is more "relaxed" with state and effects, and svelte (and Vue 3) go the compilation route to keep the illusion a bit better. Both can get nasty quickly, with complilation hacks playing significant part.
For a current small project I started with Vue (mainly for Quasar) but switched to React due to Vue magic starting to break. Now useMemo is starting to get unwieldly, so probably switching to SolidJS or Preact/signals.
I was a web developer before jQuery, during jQuery and still am after jQuery. You really want react/similar even for very small apps. I went and tried to implement a simple calculator app without any dependencies just to see if it got better with Web components, but not really, way too limited to be useful for anything other than purely design tokens if you don't want to reimplement React. jQuery is not really necessary any more, the problems it used to fix are solved - but there is still no support to make a reasonably organized and performant reactive application.
BTW not sure what you mean with the useMemo - I built very large applications in React (hundreds of complex dynamic financial analysis pages) and didn't have much problems with it - could you go into detail please?
I was a web developer before XMLHttpRequest. JQuery is just a convenient way of using the DOM, and this has not been fixed (especially addEventListener is a horrid API, but many others too). If you're coding for browser, there's no escaping the DOM. Web components are an orthogonal thing. You don't necessarily need components at all to do web frontend.
React is a fundamentally different paradigm from the event-based DOM, but it tries to do a (leaky) stateless abstraction on it. You can have event-based APIs with different kinds of organizations. E.g. SolidJS is an event-based framework with component organization.
useMemo requires explicit tracking of dependencies, and it requires a lot of handholding to update just what is needed. Of course you can do practically anything with it, but it can get tedious and error prone.
We lap up all the open source and ideas that the FAANGs of the world put out and presume they are awesome because...it is hard to get hired there? People've heard of them? They pay a lot?
It's all political bullshit instead of actually doing the hard work of evaluating the idea and implementation.
What's this we shit? I've been saying this since all this garbage started dropping way the hell back in the days of yore. I fucking hate all of these stupid frameworks with the burning passion of a dying star. We know how to build websites, we know how to build software. I have never learned these stupid frameworks and I have no intention of doing so, if you want a website, I'll build you a great damn website and no maybe it won't be web scale or able to handle sixty quadrillion connections, but it'll work, it'll be on time, it'll be under budget and you won't need a comp-sci graduate with 12 years of industry experience if you want to change what color the fucking buttons are.
