I'm having a hard time understanding why. You need like 3 or 4 libraries to have a pretty featureful experience with React (routing lib, some kind of HTTP clien

I'm having a hard time understanding why. You need like 3 or 4 libraries to have a pretty featureful experience with React (routing lib, some kind of HTTP client library most likely, state if you don't want to do that in React proper... probably some kind of form library unless React has stopped sucking at that since last time I used it) and one of those is React itself. You can add more if you want but you probably don't need them. When one of those libraries falls out of favor and goes stale, it's easier to replace one of them than to migrate to a new framework. There's just not enough to do on the client-side to justify a framework. The browser handles so much already.