The main reason that React is popular is because it is popular. I do not know where others come from, but I can tell where I come from: Web Standards Movement.

The main reason that React is popular is because it is popular. I do not know where others come from, but I can tell where I come from: Web Standards Movement. There was such a thing some 15 years ago. People who cared about semantics, standards, accessibility. React is not bad. SPAs are not bad. That's bad is not having the understanding what should be SPA and what should not. Loading a couple of hundreds KB of scripts to show 1KB (ir you are lucky) of content is not OK. Alas, if you think that static (horror) or server-side generated (shock, horror) pages still have a place you will be brushed aside as someone who thinks that web peaked with Perl-based CGI scripts. Alas, a lot of what happens in web space now looks like inventing new solutions to the invented problems.