[giraffe_lady]

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.