The major turn for the average user was actually 2009/2010. IE6 usage seems to have dropped below 1% by 2012, still before React's public release: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
That said, I was on a team that was still supporting IE6 around 2014. We had clients, mostly in China from what I heard, that were required to use it because internal tooling had developed around it and their IT teams wouldn't let them upgrade.
Yeah, I worked on things geared towards the general public so we had to support, say, a senior citizen who was using old computers at the underfunded library or senior center. They weren’t a high percentage of total traffic but it was still millions of people.
It was definitely frustrating knowing that a better world was possible but not quite there.
That colored a lot of low-level decisions about how events were implemented, false claims about virtual DOMs being fast or efficient, and especially the culture of adding dependencies because you need a feature which wasn’t in Internet Explorer. Once that trend is established, it’s hard to change without breaking compatibility and so you end up with people in 2025 using slower code based on the support matrix set over a decade earlier.
(And to be clear, I’m not saying that React has no redeeming values - only just it’s healthy to reconsider decisions made in previous decades to see whether the cost/benefit ratio has changed. I think we’re going to see some really interesting shifts as funding for open source shifts in a non-boom economy, but also as LLMs adjust the working style & relationship many people have to maintenance.)