I think its easier to say that because of the past history of moving targets with JS. The "aha" moment you get with React is it abstracts things in a very easy to understand way with JSX at its heart. You then find it quite easy to move from React Web to React Native to React VR or whatever other thing they cook up because its just simple to look at abstraction without the hairy object boilerplate that you are normally subjected to.

Maybe React itself is just another flavor but the JSX paradigm is really the goodness I think more frameworks could use which cough cough was done by Microsoft a long time ago.

Vanila JS is part of the browser stack, a bit like UNIX and C, Java and JVM, CLR and C#, iOS and Objective-C/Swift, Android and Java,....

Those who master the platform win, regardless of flavour of the month Framework that one puts on top of it.

Very silly. If you are keeping up with the latest and greatest in JS, you have the 20 minutes to sit down and learn the basics of a framework that will make your life a bit easier. This argument will never end, code hipsters need their voices heard.