For the last few projects I worked on, we first built super basic prototypes in different frameworks (React, Next, Vue, Svelte, Drupal, Wordpress, jQuery, Symfony, Angular back in the day, etc.) before choosing one to settle on, trying to balance concerns like DX, hireability, UX, hosting & infra costs, whatever.
If I were instead just forced to use a certain framework without doing due diligence, I'd be pretty annoyed too.
Undoubtedly there are people chasing the "new fancy", but also, by now React is considered pretty old and mature and (probably) kinda lame to anyone really wanting the newest edgy framework.
To your point, though, the SPA routing system (and how it interacts with browser history and URLs) is a pain indeed. React Router, in particular, handles it pretty terribly, IMO (it's much better in a system like Next).