[preommr]

Wait a minute, react isn't great because they came up with some ground breaking new concept in ui programming. It's popular because it allows for component based design and updating only what it needs to by diffing. These aren't really novel concepts. It's just a good implementation of ideas that's really helped by mass adoption and the overall community converging on one particular framework leading to lots of tutorials, guides, etc.

Even before react, I had webapps where I'd cobbled together helper objects that did things pretty similar to react, although obviously not as robust.