Ember is focused pretty heavily on convention over configuration which, IMO, ends up making everything a little harder to get into. You have to do things the "ember way" or you face a large uphill climb.
Ember is all encompassing as well. You make an Ember app. You don't make an app that happens to have some ember capabilities.
The reason react is popular (IMO) is because it's just the view layer. It allows for you to work with whatever other ecosystem you like in a fairly flexible manner.
Do I really have to do things the “non-Ember” way just to figure out what the Ember way is on my own?
I found Ember to be very frustrating in that regard.
It’s great if you like it and you’re productive with it, but if you’ve experience other options you might find it restrictive and stifling.
I don’t think of it as a direct comparison to react or the react community though. There are other frameworks like it though and in my experience, it is better than they are. I guess what it came down to was that when I was confined to ember conventions, it seemed like I could often do so much more with other tools, with fewer constraints and restrictions. I suppose what the framework offered that the individual libraries didn’t wasn’t very useful to me.
Frameworks always come with trade offs and sometimes conventions are a great thing to trade for. A large team sharing an ember code base might actually be more productive than one using an ad hoc framework of all the other tools I like.
Back when I used symfony in php land for example (comparable to laravel), I loved its conventions in the context of a large team and rarely thought about the times it got in the way.