Again, Facebook did an incredible job. I'm just commenting on why some people (not me) feel like React is "just another framework oh my god when does this stop". If they released the VDOM engine separately and the framework parts after that, people would understand that you can build your application in a way where you can pop out React and replace it with any other VDOM implementation. Most people don't seem to know this, and that's why they insist on calling it a framework.
Also, JSX caused so much confusion among people who were used to template engines. There was a huge opposition to React as a whole simply because JSX looked weird when people were explicitly taught to never mix JS with HTML. React didn't need JSX to work. For my first applications I didn't use it because I didn't want an extra compilation step, and the build/packaging tools back then were quite painful when compared to those of today. I could use React perfectly fine and it did its job in pure JS. JSX to me was just syntactic sugar, but it became a huge red herring to people who were introduced to React.
This is opposed to releasing it all at once, meaning you could sit down and learn the new things in one go, and apply that knowledge for some time before needing to learn anything else.
Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of a React dev who falsely believes they are not a web dev!
As for that last statement: not sure if you're missing words, but when I say someone is not a web dev, I mean they not web devs. They may be devs, and the technologies they use might use part of the web stack, but they're not developing web content, they're developing different content with a completely different event model, a completely different UI methodology, and completely different runtime requirements.
Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of someone who doesn't understand their deployment target well enough to do the right thing, so educate them. Whether that's because they're only used to React, or because they don't realise that web content comes with conventions that they're not adhering to makes no difference. Any time you see broken behaviour, it's because the web stack made that easier than doing the right thing. That's on all of us.
Nah, that would probably be another framework, Angular is the usual offender. React-Router handles this perfectly.
Heck, it speaks to how well written their docs and tutorials were, and how easy it was to pick up, that it became this popular in the first place. After all: React isn't actually a web technology, it's a traditional OOP framework that happens to use the browser as its UI layer. Nothing it does respects how the real webstack works, and makes it impossible to debug "as a web page".
Irrespective of how you feel about that part (because I love React as UI framework, but hate how we've told React devs that they're web dev, when they're very much not), the fact that it's stuck around and has become as popular as it now is speaks volumes to how much their release history was just fine.