[enlyth]

That's a problem with the npm ecosystem.

React is just so, so much nicer to work with. It's easy to be dismissive if you've never had to develop UIs with jQuery and didn't experience yourself the transition to React which is a million times better in terms of developer experience.

I feel like people that don't build UIs themselves think of them too much in a completely functional way as in "it's just buttons and form inputs that do X", and forget about the massive complexity, edge cases, aesthetic requirements, accessibility, rendering on different viewports, huge statefulness, and so on.

[engineeringwoke]

Old is better is just not true here. React is a dream. Synthetic eventing, batched updates, and DOM node re-use are so good. I rolled my own DOM renderer recently and remembered a lot of problems from the past that I would not like to re-visit.

[somatic]

Yes, you're absolutely right: React itself is great. But React is part of the NPM ecosystem; try using one without the other.

And then if you're still feeling cocky try finding someone else who uses one without the other.