For what it's worth, the landscape of Web development was much, much different in 2014 or so. Ruby on Rails was still a huge player, and most major OSS projects

For what it's worth, the landscape of Web development was much, much different in 2014 or so. Ruby on Rails was still a huge player, and most major OSS projects meant to enable Web development took a lot of cues from it. Projects like Angular, Ember.JS, and Backbone (and for that matter, Rails' own Turbolinks system) very much expected you to build your entire application in them from the get-go. The gist of React saying "this is a view library" at that point was largely about what you should expect React not to do for you. For example, two-way data binding, where the framework managed a fetch lifecycle as well as plugging the result into a view. "React is a view library" was letting devs know that they shouldn't expect React to do this- they should expect to make calls themselves and re-render the view accordingly. I actually think it's still fair to say that React *itself* is still "just a view library", but that's sorta like saying Linux is "just a kernel". Sure, it's technically true, but at this point when we're talking about React we're talking about the whole ecosystem surrounding it as well. That wasn't the case 10 years ago (damn, has it really been that long?)