Agree on the direction this post is going, but that's a really cynical way of looking at it. My perspective is that a combination of factors (and FB's engineering clout played no small part) in making React trendy enough where people started using it because it was cool, not because it actually solves their problem. And I'd imagine in a lot of cases those projects aren't complex enough to warrant React, and/or developers have dived in without really understanding how it works and what it does.