There where other toolkits before react, Dojo, MooTools, YUI each had their pros and cons. The problem was they where all fiefdoms similar to how Angular is. Wh

There where other toolkits before react, Dojo, MooTools, YUI each had their pros and cons. The problem was they where all fiefdoms similar to how Angular is. Where React really hit while the iron was how was that the whole JavaScript build and packaging system was moving to npm and react was one of the first sane component models available in that ecosystem. Unlike the previous attempts React did not try to be all things to all people, it was laser focused on being a component model and life-cycle. You got the rest via a plethora of options via npm install. As a side not React also bucked what was the sage wisdom of the time which was, don't mix templates with code via the introduction of JSX. This came from the very real and sage pattern of separation of concerns but somewhere along the way we confused separations of technologies with separations of concerns. If a piece of CSS, a piece of HTML and a piece of JS are all dealing with the same black box concern and are not reusable outside of that black box, separation of technologies (i.e separate files for each) only serves to add complexity to the solution as it abstracts them away from each other, forces the need to resolve their interdependence and obfuscates the ability to quickly get an entire overview of the black box.