[pibaker]

I mean, that means someone at your work liked React enough to choose it over the alternatives.

I see a lot of personal projects, solo founder applications etc running made in React. I respect your opinion but other people definitely do choose it when they have fully control of what they use.

[wesselbindt]

I've been in the situation a couple of times where we had full control over choosing the frontend framework. Every time we chose React, the main argument was hirability and the fact that the engineers in question were most proficient in React. That is, inertia.

Secondly, when someone new asks me what web framework to learn, I tell them React. And the main reason, every time, is that this is more likely to get them a job, i.e., inertia.

We got here somehow. Clearly, React didn't get here purely on momentum, and must have done something less poorly than the other frameworks. But I think it's hard to deny that inertia plays a big role in its current popularity.

[janalsncm]

That doesn’t mean they like it now, and more importantly it doesn’t mean it was actually the best choice at the time.

I used to be on a team that used Mongo for a relational database because Mongo was trendy at one time. So all joins had to be done in the application layer.

[r0m4n0]

Hey careful, I actually didn't say I do or have worked with React :)

I think you get me now but I'm just merely stating the stickiness and trendiness of these architecture decisions. Some other people mention this but just because a majority of the industry works on something doesn't mean it is the best.

I am a bit of the proof of this. I work on Angular at Google and have for a long time. It is kind of comical because I have worked on a few side projects outside of Google and I always use Angular, I know it too well.

I built a massive Angular webapp recently (2025) outside of Google and have had multiple people approach me about migrating it to React. They come at me like this is some old thing that needs to be refactored to unlock the modern times. It's just curious, there are large groups of people that don't really even understand what they are doing, they are just chasing words and hype. Mind you, there are reasons to pick one framework over the other still... but let's at least debate that instead of just the names of frameworks. React has won the framework adoption race so I can't argue much there.

[TonyStr]

Most decision-makers make decisions based on what they already know. Most of my colleagues only know React, because they've only been exposed to React. Why do you think Java dominates the market still? React solved a huge problem when it was new, and it still solves that problem fine (change detection - the reactivity model). There are better alternatives available now (Vue - signals), but the difference isn't big enough to create a new monoculture. Sure there are peripheral concerns like how mature the ecosystem is or the particular ergonomics of a framework, but these are mostly fluff.