I think this is a fair criticism and I agree that I might have used this comparison in a simplified way to make my point, but I think the primary thesis still holds: when building a React app, you necessarily need to make a very large number of choices that you don't need to make when building Ember.

This isn't because React is bad, it's because React is just the view layer! If we look at it this way, we can re-examine that list as:

* language

* view

* data modeling

* routing

* network connections

* functional utilities

* build

* styling

* testing

And, with React, when you have just a view layer, if you want to build an advanced application, you likely need to add on a bunch of other layers to get everything working. I hear you about being able to "just use React", but I also think that's a an oversimplification the other way: how many applications on the web today are built with only the view layer and none of the others?

After evaluating all the decisions we made in the past when building a React app, we decide to trust someone else to make them for us :)

p.s. the original title was "Choosing Ember of the React ecosystem in 2016" but I ended up shortening it :)