Wordpress goes with react, drupal picks angular2, and laravel favors vuejs.

This is no surprise, wordpress is extremely popular these days for all users, a huge angular2 client framework might be an overkill for many of its users. Drupal on the other hand is doing the more complicated websites, and its "ordinary" user base is shrinking, so angular2 might attract enterprise users.

Laravel is arguably the most popular PHP framework today, choosing vuejs as its client framework gave vuejs a strong boost for sure.

Agreed, Vue.js and Riot.js are both brilliant for actually getting things done without having to read a 100 page manual.

As for Vue vs Riot, it's subjective, but I'm personally partial to Riot due to its simplicity (albeit with a smaller feature list) and focus on components without being opinionated at all (not even regarding the toolchain).

That doesn't address the issues the comment just above you (at time of writing) brings up, namely that even with Vue you still need to set up all the tool chain around it, whereas Angular brings a lot of that to the table for you.

I handle a big React app at my job. It's messy as fuck with JSX. We made a transition to Vue. Couldn't be happier.

What in particular about JSX makes it messy compared to vue? Messy template code can happen in both.

Vue templates support conditional rendering (v-if/v-show/v-else) which I didn't realize I missed until using them. Also, conventions around component data are really nice and help keep markup tidy and very readable.

I like to think of Vue as React with sensible conventions. That said, both are terrific and solve UI problems very elegantly.

React handles conditional rendering better imo. You use regular JS instead of having to learn a new API. You can use control logic in your render methods to great effect.

I definitely agree that React is clean for the reasons you state and I always enjoy building UIs with it. I suppose my comment was just a reflection on the differences that I found refreshing - to my surprise.

So it's your engineer's fault. Plenty of companies get stuff done with React everyday.

If you want, you can use Vue.js just like jQuery. Pop it in a <script> tag and you're done. No tool chain needed. I do that all the time for small-medium sized projects and it works absolutely fine.