I agree with you that it's awful that a lot of young developers wouldn't be able to program without React. I would like to add as someone would has no problems

I agree with you that it's awful that a lot of young developers wouldn't be able to program without React. I would like to add as someone would has no problems working without any library that the DOM is one of worst APIs ever invented by humankind and that "reactive programming" is a superior model to what we used to do before. That being said: - NextJS rolled back years of tooling improvements, it's much slower than Vite - I just statically built a NextJS and a page that has no interactivity downloads 100KB of JS to do nothing with it - Facebook decided to make a "compiler" for React instead of just not pointlessly re-rednering components by default - Compared to Preact which is almost a drop in replacement, React is huge! This shows how little Facebook cares.