React is great for SPAs. Most large companies are working on honest-to-god SPAs. By extension most engineers are working on SPAs. So most tooling is created for SPAs. Now if you aren't building an SPA you look around and find almost every resource is around building an SPA. Even if you know you don't need an SPA, it's easier to hire, iterate, and even use other open source solutions if you are building an SPA, so you try to hamfist your project into an SPA.
It's a bit like having a bike commute in America. A bike might be the best thing for you to do - cheaper than a car, keeps you healthy and you don't need a garage. But you quickly find that everything is built for cars and it's easier to deal with the disadvantages of a car than try to commute with a bike.
I remember thinking the same thing about Hadoop 5-6 years ago. If you had "small data" you could get what you wanted with SQL and fast disks. But everything else assumed you were on Hadoop. Newgrads were trained in hadoop. New tools were Hadoop first. New research was all hadoop. If you hit a small issue with your DB, almost every solution would be "this is how it's solved in Hadoop". It was hard to even know if what you were trying to do what even possible without Hadoop.
The only optimism I have is that maybe in 5 years we will all collectively wake up and stop trying to shove React everywhere just like we stopped with Hadoop.