I imagine the career growth would have happened regardless of which framework became the new hotness. That is, any framework with similar usage/growth would have done the same. I've just seen the pattern too many times.
Maybe, it's hard to say. Whether or not it caused it significantly or how it was involved, the "react era" has coincided with a huge increase in demand, pay and respect for front-end specialists.
A whole webdev cohort came up on and with these technologies, were taken seriously because of their mastery of them, and have moved into areas of tech and engineering that would have been absolutely off-limits to "mere" html/css developers.
I'm not willing to claim that react alone made that happen, but it's not at all clear to me that it would have without react having the timing, momentum, and cachet that it has.
No, the career growth happened in 2015 when we adopted React and stopped endlessly inserting JS and CSS tags from jQuery plugins. Backbone made things worse. Angular made things worse. React objectively changed my life and allowed me to work several remote jobs at once. I watched half a dozen startups adopt React for the better. There is no similar growth or usage to React. React is the king.
Exactly. The first time I observed this it was some Perl/CGI framework who's name I've forgotten. Then ColdFusion, then COM, PHP (Cake, Zend) and on the front there was that hotness before jQuery (which I've forgot), jQuery, that other one for a spell and now React.
Loads of people board the train at the most recent stop and are amazed how "fast" it's going.
At least with surfing all the waves are different - in web-tech it feels like the same wave over and over.
> there was that hotness before jQuery (which I've forgot)
Prototype and Script.aculo.us? I remembered being in Prototype camp because I deemed jQuery to be too different (and in a hindsight, that was one of my worst decision in tech)
A whole webdev cohort came up on and with these technologies, were taken seriously because of their mastery of them, and have moved into areas of tech and engineering that would have been absolutely off-limits to "mere" html/css developers.
I'm not willing to claim that react alone made that happen, but it's not at all clear to me that it would have without react having the timing, momentum, and cachet that it has.