The sweet spot is still there, in theory. React itself is just a few functions forming a very simple (but not necessarily intuitive) abstraction. The issue is

The sweet spot is still there, in theory. React itself is just a few functions forming a very simple (but not necessarily intuitive) abstraction. The issue is the community is batshit and it's almost impossible to find or build a team that's going to democratically decide to use a sensible approach. If you want to keep a simple codebase on a React project your three options are build the entire thing yourself, be the best interviewer of all time and find a one in a million team, or be willing to be an absolute nazi and piss off a bunch of confident amateurs that want to overengineer everything. If you can somehow avoid ending up with 20 other shit dependencies then React is a big upgrade over the frameworks that came before.