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.
You can’t have an easy solution when you have tons of interaction and state.