> A lot of the talk about it was "React is here to stay"
Unless Facebook has announced that they are abandoning React, this statement is as true as it ever was at any point in time.
Where I work, we just had a bunch of new hires and they're being productive within the first couple weeks because they know React, and our app uses React Native.
React-knowledgeable devs are in high demand right now, which drives smart devs to learn it and garner experience with it, which makes it more desirable to use as a tool in your stack.
If the tools you're using cause your code to be inherently difficult to grok, then that is an engineering problem, but that has nothing to do with how fashionable the tool might be.