The best explanation I've seen for why React is such a pleasant experience, is that it's a text-based version of the best parts of Visual Basic - you use React

The best explanation I've seen for why React is such a pleasant experience, is that it's a text-based version of the best parts of Visual Basic - you use React to lay out pre-built UI components, build your own new ones, and the UI behavior is a function of the properties you set. React, and similar libraries, have the advantage of being parasitic - you can fit them in along with a lot of what's already out there, without necessarily having to rewrite what you've already build. I.e., you can easily use UI frameworks that are agnostic to Javascript library pairings. As an example of this, I built https://www.findlectures.com/ https://www.findlectures.com/ with TypeScript + React, starting with no CSS library, then added bootstrap, then replaced Bootstrap with Semantic-UI. This makes me appreciate some of the flexibility of the ecosystem now, even though it comes with the pain of having too many options for a lot of the individual components.