I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate
Here's a chart where you can see daily download counts for react, angular, and angular2.
http://npmcharts.com/compare/angular,react,angular2
React does indeed have about 4x as many daily downloads, but (Angular 1 + 2)'s download counts are ~5x what they were a year ago. (iirc the ng-europe RIP Angular fiasco happened in October 2014)