I actually have developed web UIs for 9 years professionally and remember evaluating Angular1 vs React. In angular I built an app with tons of great features, b

I actually have developed web UIs for 9 years professionally and remember evaluating Angular1 vs React. In angular I built an app with tons of great features, but React was far more terse and honest about how things work because there were not really big DSLs or magic features, instead you built trees of JS objects that used the pretty thin JSX syntax to accomplish this. I admit JSX was of course exactly a DSL in some small ways but primarily it was just more terse and semantic. When you think about major UI frameworks, the fundamental concept of composition is clearly key. State is the other idea at play, and their interrelation needs to have obvious life cycles to be predictable. React accomplished this as well in a very intuitive fashion that is also exactly as performant as you can wire a VDOM based approach to be. The react team’s foresight and rule based approach continues to be cutting edge with hooks, as they are more honest and terse than class-based components. Finally, wiring up my favorite state library mobx gave me free render optimization and incredibly smooth code authoring capabilities all for one. This was around long before hooks, but still remains top tier as well. Kool aid is both a poor drink and a poor representation of why I chose React and continue to enjoy building applications with it.