It's a myth you need a large team to create a React app.
From the bottom of page 11: Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years... (continues with another paragraph).
In most of the companies Ive worked at for more than a few years some major piece of the architecture changes in ways unforeseen by the original designers. This usually incurs massive changes on the frontend, since it's often the glue that wires everything together. Migrating to react from a simpler framework is a minuscule amount of the effort. Large structural changes for growing software products are the norm, not the exception. If your project never gets past the initial stages its pointless to plan for the future when there might be none. Which is what this guy's project was, an initial project on a weekend retreat.
There are many small things I don't want to recreate that are always needed in every web app. Translations, authorization, accessibility, bug tracking, and more.
Another person said it best. You aren't going to use your own C++ compiler just because it's simpler and you don't need all the features, why do the same to the toolchains for the web?
These "anti-React" and "web is too complex" articles are common.
It takes 1 command to generate a React project, all the configuration is done for you. This includes code-splitting where it generates a small runtime. The other chunks in the bundle are pretty small. Most of the dependencies are just for development.
React components themselves are easy to write and they don't lock you in to just the web.