I can confirm. On HN, meetups, Twitter, etc. no one talks about MEAN stack any more because of Mongo and the Angular 1/2 split (and React's popularity). In the last hackathon I went to, like most "corporate sponsored" ones, you got a special prize for using it.

Are people using React starter kits? The major issue I'd see with React at hackathons is the large amount of configuration you typically need to do before you get started. I dislike starter kits due to the additional complexity overhead, but I can imagine for a throwaway project they'd be fine.

thanks for spelling that out for me

great incentive to dive into React further and ditch Mongo

if you are just messing around you might be interested in vuejs & rethinkdb. found it a pretty intuitive stack, much easier than react for me

I think this is part of the reason who RoR, MEAN and other such frameworks are so popular. They tend to be easier to setup and many developers love it. My own theory is there are so many bad devs out there so that contributes to the hype because so may devs end up adopting it.

Take it with a grain of salt...

MEAN isn't as easy to set up and I would not compare it to Rails at all. Rails is a backend framework—MEAN is just a bunch of technologies used together to have an API and a SPA. I'd actually argue, from personal experience, that newbies have a lot of trouble with MEAN because while there's a CLI tool MEAN doesn't have the community support, conventions, etc. that Rails does. Plus, you have to learn too many things at once.

outside of HN people hype it up

Just today CNBC announced its list of "the 2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies"[1]

MongoDB is #19. It apparently is:

   Big data's thought leader

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/07/2016-cnbcs-disruptor-50.html

It's accurate. MongoDB is killing it in the Big Data space.

Because of its excellent integration with Spark/Hadoop and the schemaless nature it's very useful in the analytics space.

I like the Postgres/Express/Ember/Node stack, if not just for the acronym.