I agree. React is a great rendering library which somehow became the core of a mix and match framework, plagued by backwards incompatibility and maintained by plethora of individuals. As a result upgrading dependencies is never safe and and each of tens of them is quite likely to introduce breaking changes or become obsolete, leaving you having to make unnecessary changes in your app.

Don't get me wrong, I think React is good at what it does, which is rendering. I just don't think the maintenance of a react app, which includes dependency management, is worth the benefits. Similarly the current model of reinventing everything in the "react way" is hardly speeding up development.