I didn't get that sense from the post. I took that they were advocating for basic HTML/JS when appropriate. A reminder that it's still a valid way of doing things.

If you're building an app, yeah use React.

If you want to put some contact info on the internet, there's no reason it can't be vanilla HTML.

Or at least that's how I read it.

Looking over the article again, I'd say your right. It was the statement "The web is built around server-side rendering." that made me feel that way. As a whole you're right.

However, I didn't think everyone was out making landing pages with React and VueJS. Maybe they are.

you could also use gatsby to generate static sites in that case -- imo react offers enough developer quality of life features where it's pretty hard to justify not using it