Technology ages, I remember liking React a lot way back in the day. Things improve and circumstances change. Things like the virtual dom are just not needed anymore and I just want my frontend code to be deterministic, it's not like I'm writing a distributed system, it's a client ui. So calling React "fundamentally bad" is harsh but I think given the state of the world today it's true.

> the dev lead knowledge, the experience of the team and the learning vs churn out features culture

This could be said of any team using any technology. If the team is better at using it, and they are provided more time to use it properly, then they'll make a better product. That's not unique to React.

React sucks because its scope creep makes it difficult to maintain, and there's a pretty low ceiling for the end user's experience. Yes, better teams can make better products with React than worse teams, but that doesn't mean that either end product is any good.

Coming from the assumption that Facebook should have tons of experienced people using React, their implementation on Facebook.com just plainly sucks after 7+ years. The UI is slow, breaks back button navigation often, loads completely different views in case a tab goes into background and gets reloaded (I have multiple tabs open from FB Groups that interested me, many of them default to opening my Home feed or the Groups main page after a background reload).

If Facebook.com cannot get it right, who actually can?

"No True Scotsman" is also a trope going on for > 100 years, yet you are appealing to it.