To me it seems like most of the new updates to React are not there to solve a problem most apps in the wild have, but rather to solve some very specific Facebook-related issue which 99.9% of us will actually never even encounter on our web apps because they will never be Facebook scale.
Every React update solves a very specific Facebook issue but it's because React is developed by Facebook for Facebook.
React was and is developed to solve Facebook problems, not community problems.
Unfortunately there is a lot of hype about corporate backed libraries and they get adopted by the community because the hype, not because they solve community's problems.
It does not mean these libraries are bad, quite contrary, the majority of them are very good engineered solutions, but at the end of the day, they solve corporate problems, not community problems.