Agreed!

The intent of React is to drive new developers away from the building blocks of the web. And it has definitely succeeded at that. The way its ecosystem has grown all over the place, I find very passionate developers that swear by it.

But you never know, every technology at some point of time becomes a luddite’s take and then it’d become hard to even consider React. Someday may be near as well, given that it’s already more than 10 years old now… but then that would also be a good day for open web standards and simplicity. ;-)