I've been working as a frontend dev for about 11 years. I've only ever used react for a majority of projects, also doing all kinds of work: porting angular projects into react, refactoring legacy react projects into modern react, building complex data visualizations for network topologies, and your basic CRUD stuff.
I dislike react because it's long overstayed its welcome. The vast majority of react projects are bloated messes and it truly feels like the react community is being steered by dev influencers that have very little experience working on projects (this includes the react maintainers themselves IMO).
There are way better libraries to write maintainable code in (svelte, solid, and even vue is better FFS). There are other mental frameworks that allow for good engineering practices as well like htmx or hotwire.
React is only here for the same reason that Java Spring is here, it was one of the early adopters that has too much momentum where leadership across companies are actively hostile to devs so there's no time to actually create good stuff but rather stamp out garbage so billionaires can be slightly more rich.