What happened was that web apps and SPAs got powerful enough and ubiquitous enough to deserve their own tooling and abstractions. React is about creating a prog

What happened was that web apps and SPAs got powerful enough and ubiquitous enough to deserve their own tooling and abstractions. React is about creating a program that generates a UI. Lots of people use it to build static websites because they want access to the tooling that the ecosystem has created, much of which is very good. The kind of front end development I do at work would be much harder without React, not only because the app is large, but there is a large team working on it. Using a framework and adhering to it's best practices makes onboarding easier, and coding (and reviewing code) faster.