Because they like the syntax? Because it has a nice way of passing properties? Because you can work with pseudo-DOM elements?

It's all open source. If you want a vanilla js implementation go ahead.

I find it a bit sad that the most upvoted reaction to someone's cool little project they wanted to share is the classic HN misguided and overused response of 'React BAD'

There's a reason for that. The web is roughly 90% static pages with JS sprinkled on top(usually jQuery), and 10% SPAs made in various frameworks.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library

React is a small part of the web(in terms of the number of people using it commercially) and thus a library written in React isn't terribly useful for most of the market.

> React is a small part of the web(in terms of the number of people using it commercially) and thus a library written in React isn't terribly useful for most of the market.

And why does that matter? The OP is someone's toy project, not an attempt at starting a SaaS company.

And what percetange of those "static pages with JS sprinkled on top" have a need for automatically generated custom avatars?

Quite a few actually! After all they include static pages with comment sections, forums, image boards etc. - all places where you would want to have user profiles and naturally avatars.

I don't think anyone's saying React is bad, they're saying it's weird that this library depends on it.

"You could just write that routine in plain assembly, C is really just a syntax"