Tensorflow is a lot like IBM -- it deserves praise not because it's great in its current state, but for its contributions towards advancing the broader technological front to where it is today. Tensorflow walked so JAX could run, so to speak. Frankly, I don't really draw much of a distinction between the two frameworks since I really just use them as lightweight XLA wrappers.
Tensorflow started out as anything but lightweight. In my opinion it takes the cake for kludgiest framework I've ever worked with. So verbose, so little effort put into ergonomics. Even eager mode is not really valuable unless you're working on a legacy project.