[morrvs]

I've heard the Assembly vs. C analogy a couple times now, and find it hard to apply:

Assembly languages come in many flavors whereas C is a single, standard abstraction over these.

DOM is a single, standard API whereas frameworks/libraries come in many, ever-changing flavors and provide different abstractions over the DOM.

It's a very different situation. Also, the level of abstraction that C provides over assembly is amazing. The level of abstraction that React provides over the DOM is comparably low (they are based on the same programming language).