> jQuery
Just not possible to compose, which makes full applications difficult. No answers for state management or such either, completely a different scope than frameworks
> Google more clout than FB
In some domains sure, but I’ve never understood how people don’t think FB are masters of UI. There is probably no org with more UI clout than FB, they built their own insanely adopted library after all while Google can barely force their own engineers to use Angular
React is also unquestionably the most JavaScript of the libraries, a component’s markup is such a thin abstraction around an object and maps perfectly to DOM trees and concepts, classes or functions or hooks are all using native JS concepts, explicitly typed typescript and react genuinely eliminates the need for all simple testing plus makes for a streamlined developer experience, and its concepts of lifecycles and composability introduce complexity but in my opinion in a clearly delineated and extremely powerful way
Also, as always I have to note this, the churn argument is completely overblown wrt React, each way of writing code still works or compiles, conceptually the lifecycle and state management never changed just its syntax, and npm has old versions for a reason. I run 2016 code in production today as an internal application for engineers, and I’ve seamlessly updated webpack and module versions while keeping the same code syntax.
Yep, and my interpretation is that, that (the widely known part) happened because it was backed by Instagram first (if I recall correctly) and then Facebook.
And not to invalidate your point but to add another speculation on why React became more popular...
Yes, Angular was backed by Google, but not used in production in massively successful product as Facebook, or Instagram, and I remember also about writing Directives, Services and it wasn't very inviting for third party packages.
When react came out, I remember the selling point was "it's not a framework, it's a library", "it's the V of MVC" and I think that strategy also helped to let the community create all the other pieces, and long term have a richer ecosystem.
I would argue that react has some particular merits (for three the whole vdom based architecture, using jsx, and unidirectional data flow), that it was the first (widely known) framework with those merits, and that it has generally been backwards compatible or only required simple changes. I think these do a better job of explaining why react became popular and inertia explains why it is still popular.