Except the cool new thing is still React, and we're all still here.
Folks are building products with great UX -> Clients use these products, want the same thing in their products -> Demand for frontend increases, repeat.
There's no question that it's still highly in demand, but as a user I despise React apps. Not that there's anything wrong with the technology - well-written React with minimal dependencies can provide a great and responsive UX.
In practise this rarely is the case. I have yet to use a React app that consistently respects Cmd+click as my intent to open something in a new tab, has sub-100ms draw times for any UI action, and doesn't need to load multiple megabytes of JS to bog down my CPU for basic CRUD stuff.
Of course I would prefer a native app, but I don't think it is unreasonable of me to expect a web app to:
- Respect the UI conventions of web browsers and not override standard behavior
- Respond immediately to user input
- Not take up hundreds of megabytes of RAM
I have yet to use a React app that doesn't immediately "feel" like it's using React. There's some weird added latency that I can't really describe, but I don't feel it on Angular apps.
In practise this rarely is the case. I have yet to use a React app that consistently respects Cmd+click as my intent to open something in a new tab, has sub-100ms draw times for any UI action, and doesn't need to load multiple megabytes of JS to bog down my CPU for basic CRUD stuff.