You can’t have an easy solution when you have tons of interaction and state.
My comparison is always with Svelte / Vue, and also what we had in previous eras (Backbone, Knockout, etc). HTMx is picking up steam too. We used to push out interactive UI in days/weeks, and mind you, in the past websites did not look all the same. There were no component libraries to start from. Today it seems most React projects are planned in months/quarters despite being built atop a mountain of third-party code, all meant to 'speed things up'.
What we do today is not faster at all, too much time is wasted on tooling and issues that arise from React's architecture (hooks, ssr, data loading, error handling, async issues, black-box performance issues, dependency hell).
Desktop software was never this fragile.
It's been neither of those things and I'm actually beginning to regret making that choice.
Exact same experience here. I've been banging this drum since ~2018. When hooks came around I thought they might make it better, but alas, we are still in a downwards spiral. Building web apps is 10x more complicated today than it was ten years ago, with nothing to show for it.
I'm happy to see some known voices in the community realizing this, but also sad that this is how things work now. The rise and fall of React will have been both a product of social media / developer celebrities.