What do you mean by virtue signaling, and how should they defend their choice without virtue signaling?

Is it possible that some just prefer to use something that feels closer to the W3C standards?

Or is the virtue signaling about it being a facebook project, with facebook being a threat to the open web? Angular is a google project, but I've heard some say that since Evan You used to work for google it's sort of like it's a google project, which I disagree with. The clear winner of the three for being independent of FAAMG is Vue. Angular at least has its own GitHub organization that makes it a bit less blatant of an ad for its corporate steward (remember io.js and the movement to get Node moved out of Joyent to a foundation?).

Maybe I was being hyperbolic, but it could refer to any or all of the following:

  1. The W3C standards convention
  2. Being a product of Facebook
  3. The old license being restrictive
  4. Too much hype around the framework

I'm positive I've seen people conjure these reasons before. I was deterred from React mainly for the third reason. When they fixed their license, I felt no need to pursue alternatives. I've played around with Vue a bit, and I just wasn't compelled enough to switch to it. It seemed like a solved problem already. The only thing that will get me to switch from React is a 2x in performance and/or a 10x reduction in complexity or size.

Those are all very good reasons, especially #3. It's part of React's track record and you don't have to look far to see other similarities to it. It isn't a sign of being a responsive to their userbase because they waited until the inventor of the world's most popular website publishing platform complained about it.

I don't see it as virtue-signaling but I do think there are three distinct JS communities, even if they overlap a lot, and sometimes they take swipes at each other. Maybe someone can point out more? The three I'm thinking of are 1) the classic webmaster group, aimed at building dynamic and interactive websites 2) the SPA group, making webapps, also extending into things like React-Native, but the web is just a delivery medium for their app 3) the backend group with Node, aiming at the types of things you'd otherwise have used PHP/Ruby/Python for.

I agree, and Preact is fantastic! Not only is it very fast and light, but so is the community