[hajile]

React wasn't always popular...

I remember using jQuery, Backbone/underscore, handlebars, knockout, Angular 1, Enyo, Ember, and probably a couple others. Angular in particular had like 70% market share among major frameworks and almost all the libraries didn't support React.

React took over because it was head and shoulders better than everything that went before and taking days to learn instead of weeks or even months.

The reason nothing has taken over since is because we've reached the point where they aren't good enough to justify throwing away all the existing library support.