People were doing SPAs way before react came around (and it took a few years for it become popular), I myself had a jQuery-based SPA a few years before React wa

People were doing SPAs way before react came around (and it took a few years for it become popular), I myself had a jQuery-based SPA a few years before React was released and when I saw React I was like: "this solves all of the problems my codebase has" React was more of a replacement for jQuery/BackboneJS/MooTools/Angular/etc than a replacement for PHP/JSP/ASP/etc