[eagsalazar2]

I'm not sure I'd agree that when React took over, Angular was a perfectly fine framework. I mean, what happened with React was actually very unusual and remains very unusual. It took over. There is this popular and snarky notion that js devs are constantly chasing every shiny thing but that is exactly the opposite of what has happened over the last several years with React. Instead I'd argue that js devs were nomads prior to React because none of the existing solutions were solving the big problems they had. Not because they are ADD fad chasers. Also I don't remember seeing React "marketing" any more than any other framework. Of course when Google or FB or any other major player gets behind a framework, we take notice, but that doesn't have anything to do with why React took off. It won because frp in a FE framework with the Flux pattern was a total game changer and made FE development awesome for the first time ever (well since Flex, I'll take your word for it since that is even before my time (I cut my FE teeth on jquery and Dojo!))

[miracle2k]

When React first come out, the whole notion of mixing HTML and Javascript code was, if anything, widely rejected. Rather than going viral as a kind of fashionable thing, I feel that it really had to earn its position.

[macspoofing]

>When React first come out, the whole notion of mixing HTML and Javascript code was, if anything, widely rejected.

And it still is. Mixing JS and HTML/DOM does result in fragile code and you shouldn't do it. React VDOM and JSX is not the same thing .. at all. Again, JSX isn't new. XML-based declarative UI frameworks with data-biding were an old thing by the time React arrived on the scene. That's how Flash Flex (MXML) and Silverlight (XAML) worked, for example.