I think the transition could have been much smoother and did not require engineering a new MVC framework on top of an already existing MVC framework. The only thing needed to make a page mobile ready is responsive CSS. What is more of a concern for mobile, and especially was back in 2009, is how much processing power a page needs to render and function fluidly.

The truth is React isn't doing anything that requires new technology, it could've been built in the early 2000's. I guess ideas like Angular taking off are just the natural way of things when you have a big company supporting it. It goes to show though that even the largest companies on the planet sometimes get it wrong (but also get many things right, Google with Golang and Facebook with React). Did it really take 4-5 other inferior frameworks though to see the simplistic idea behind React and build it out? If so, people who see these bad practices happening and are capable of doing something about it should do so immediately, for the sake of the development community.