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As other people have said, they're different sorts of thing; but the sort of thing React is wasn't as big a deal in 2010. Backbone and AngularJS, two frameworks that are practically Precambrian at this point, both had their first release in late 2010.

In 2010 terms: let's say you want to write a web app. jQuery : your library of useful PHP functions :: React : Ruby on Rails. That analogy breaks down in many obvious ways (React isn't MVC and [modulo JSX transpilation and whatnot] uses the same language as jQuery, Rails is not easy to reason about especially if you're in 2010 and method_missing isn't considered harmful yet), but hopefully the basic idea comes through - library of functions vs. very opinionated framework that facilitates rapid development.