Or are trying to follow fads so they're more employable (resume-driven development?) Which is a strategy I am not criticizing in the slightest. It can suck when it means the whole team has to learn the fad framework, though.
This is definitely a thing. Lots of tech choices are made for that reason, not just front end frameworks, as I'm sure you know. But there's no incentive to put one's foot down and declare that the emperor, indeed, has no clothes, so we keep praising his fashion sense and taking home our pay. This is true for developers at all levels, project managers, CTOs, and so on. Every one of them becomes more employable—easier to find the next job, next job's higher-paying—for having lead or been a member of a team using inappropriate or sub-optimal but trendy or "serious" tools. "No one got fired for choosing..." has extended to a ton of trendy crap, a fair bit of it half-baked, and you're not only safer but also better off financially than if you risk suggesting anything else, even if "standard" solutions slow down development, require more and more expensive people (that's the point, you want to be one of those!), and make your systems more fragile.