> But there are also a lot of problems for which I can’t see any concrete benefit to using React. Those are things like blogs, shopping-cart-websites, mostly-CRUD-and-forms-websites. For these things, all of the fancy optimizations are optimizations to get you closer to the performance you would’ve gotten if you just hadn’t used so much technology.

I think this is at the root of it — most web devs today don't see that some plurality or small majority of web app use cases these days just don't require the tradeoffs of SPAs.

But there's a generation of devs who've come up exclusively on JS tooling (Node, Express, React/Redux or Angular) and the crowding effect has therefore made those the default choices, if only because the labor pool is big.

My honest belief is you can more quickly build most functionality needed for most businesses with a plain-old full stack framework like Rails or Django these days.

But the real value of those frameworks doesn't show in the initial speed to build (though it's there!) — it really shows up in how much common functionality (logins, file uploads, etc.) you get for free 6-12 months in, and how low your cost of change stays over time as a comparable SPA app becomes a pain in the butt to add new features to.