> This is incredibly naive. React's sole success relies on Facebook heavily pushing it in the conference circuit. "How React Saved my Life" was the go-to talk title in the 2010s.
I was around when React took off. People may have been aware of it because of marketing, but every web developer I know wanted to immediately switch to it, even before class components, because it represented a fundamental paradigm shift in how web applications would be built, and it was self-evidently better than anything else anyone had thought to suggest.
The was a popular talk because _it was true_. React changed frontend web development from a tedious chore offloaded to the junior-most members of your team and elevated it to something everyone takes seriously.
It was a very, very long time before there was anything useful competing with React. Nothing really started to compete with the sheer volume of people who wanted to work with it until JSX proliferated across the frameworks. Just JSX alone was enough to convince people to switch to React.
I was around when React took off. People may have been aware of it because of marketing, but every web developer I know wanted to immediately switch to it, even before class components, because it represented a fundamental paradigm shift in how web applications would be built, and it was self-evidently better than anything else anyone had thought to suggest.
The was a popular talk because _it was true_. React changed frontend web development from a tedious chore offloaded to the junior-most members of your team and elevated it to something everyone takes seriously.
It was a very, very long time before there was anything useful competing with React. Nothing really started to compete with the sheer volume of people who wanted to work with it until JSX proliferated across the frameworks. Just JSX alone was enough to convince people to switch to React.