[acdha]

You’re still writing code which is based on React’s view of the world, not standard web APIs. Saying it’s not a framework just means that people are cobbling together their own frameworks using some popular libraries, which gives more flexibility at the cost of the various combinations being less tested and harder for someone else to support.

To be clear, this can be a reasonable trade off – but there’s a cost which people often discount until they realize they just spent a week wrestling with abstraction layers.