Smaller, cleaner, and faster code while still focusing on dynamic interfaces? Svelte or SolidJS

Focus on server-side HTML rendering with little to no browser dynamism? PHP (It really is quite nice now.)

Focus on server-side HTML rendering with some browser dynamism? HTMX + server framework (PHP, Django, Go templates, etc.)

Getting a job as quickly and easily as possible, especially at larger companies? React or Angular (You're a cog in the machine, but cogs often get better paychecks to deal with multi-megabyte code blobs.)

Can't decide between code elegance/performance and finding a job, so you're willing to compromise a little on both? Vue

React is hobbled by the need to retain backward compatibility, but it is boosted by sheer scale and a solid underlying philosophy, design, and engineering.

Someday, we will probably find a fundamentally better philosophy for UI frameworks, but I don't know yet what it will be. React replaced its MVC predecessors with a functional approach, the Flux model.

AFAICT, if you pick any of the others options you'll have to refactor your site every 3-4 years as all the tools bit rot. One won't run on the latest version of node so you upgrade node. Now 2 other libraries fail and require an upgrade. Now another library fails because it's not compatible with those upgrades, repeat. You thought you were just going to fix a bug or add a small feature that would take you a few hours but now you've got few days/weeks of refactoring before you can even start.

Now is WebComponents prime time. Libraries like Lit have just a little bit of code that makes the DX of webcomponents be top notch. Some people like to use TS with it but what I love about lit is how powerful it is with just vanilla JS and no compile/bundling/building phase. Development directly in the browser, sane stack traces and faster than anything I've seen.

Lit code is similar to what React was until the 16 version.