[cormacrelf]

The definitive answer to this question is: it sells itself better to managers. The truth is that for many good and bad reasons, people with decision-making power are scared of dependencies.

My company uprooted a few months of React development because Angular (2) comes with batteries included and we wouldn't have to rely on third-party stuff to fill in the gaps. The amount of stuff you get is... not actually that much, but it's enough to sell it. Of course, our new package.json is just as long, if not longer using Angular than it was before, and I've spent arguably more time doing setup (before @angular/cli stabilised) than I ever did with React. The whole @angular/router situation with module loading is silly, who wants to load modules via strings? Yes, the default batteries-included parts work with each other very well for the basics, but what about power and flexibility?

React could go a long way in this regard just by having a few more official ways of doing things and offering a few tools straight up (a @react/router for instance) while still selling the just-part-of-a-wonderful-ecosystem thing. React is so much better at satisfying real development needs, like the hyper-extensibility via functional composition and the super-DRY code you can get out of it very quickly, that proving its worth in ways that are only superficially important would be well worth it.

[hccampos]

This makes me feel sad. As you said, maybe React could do more when it comes to packaging things up. I think Create React App is a good step in that direction but there is still work to be done.