It's funny to think back now that JSX had such a strong negative reaction on launch. That's the one thing from React I love - having a declarative and strongly typed markup for HTML in my JS/TS code.

I think React peaked with hooks around 2019. I write most of my front-end with the smallest 'React-like' library possible (Preact) using only functional components, and with as little 'magic' from useEffect etc. as possible.

I like to stay close to 'raw' HTML/CSS/JS when possible, but the web platform APIs are just a little to clunky and verbose for me without the JSX abstraction.

You can use JSX syntax without using React. You can stay close to raw HTML/CSS/JS too. See here: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder And here's a complete app example: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/tree/master/webapp/Clie...

I learn Svelte has a template language.

It is not very different from mustache, or other older template engines and it's really needed because there is no conditional html rendering, loops etc in the HTML spec itself, I like that more than how Vue does.

But otherwise, Svelte has a very low surface, everything else is just standard vanilla JS/Html, also one thing that Svelte has over other frameworks is that vanilla JS libraries just work, no need for a wrapper any.

Some devs point at Svelte and say, “not many libraries, it can’t be very good!” What they don’t realize is it doesn’t need a cottage industry of tiny adapter libraries, JS stuff works fine.

I get NextJS but how does React itself try to screw devs with PaaS?

The Getting Started docs recommend against using vanilla React and nudge you towards NextJS and similar frameworks because you're gonna end up needing that stuff eventually https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project

So new projects have to actively not follow the recommended approach in the docs if they want to use vanilla React.