React made me feel stupid, Vue made me feel smart. So I use Vue. I came at it as a long-time jQuery dev with Angular 1 experience.
If you mainly choose technology based on the fact it doesn't take any effort to learn at all, you will soon hit a wall on what software you can use overall.
Emacs was very difficult for me when I first started learning it. It was much more difficult than using a simple text editor (and this was with 10 years of programming experience)! Yet I persevered and you know what? After giving it some time and learning it properly I found myself vastly more productive with the tool.
Some things don't lend themselves well to immediate gratification. If the OP provided even a hint as to why React was more difficult for him I'm guessing it's not something with React but rather that he was using two completely different state management solutions.
I'm a big vi and sublime text user but always open for better tooling.
btw - I actually agree with you on the learning thing but React just sucks. I'm able to get shit done with Vue and at the end of the week I haven't wasted three afternoons learning jsx/webpack/deployment/relearning-a-new-way-of-doing-css blah blah. I say this with some hesitation but CSS is a solved problem in my opinion with Sass.
With Vue you can write a scalable understandable application using the documentation. The same criticisms do certainly apply, but many of the advanced features are worked into the application.
For example Vuex is bundled into Vue and has verbose and opinionated documentation on how it lives in your vue application.
The React and Redux developers are incredibly good at what they do - they've also spent a lot of time putting out material, books, video courses, blog posts, talks help everybody else understand the new paradigm they've created
They can't be that stupid when a lot of modern javascript framework components are either direct clones of, or influenced by, their work
The JS ecosystem is like the baskin robbins of st. Which is mind-blowing because JS has gotten so much better and browsers have gotten so much better in the past 10 years. Yet the apps people are creating today are worse that the st people were creating with IE8 and jQuery.
I am hardly the only one who has recognized this as a problem. I see an article from a major dev on the same topic on a regular basis here.
Can you list off any tools that you like where there aren't any people using them to make crap? Does the fact that some people produce junk undermine your success using a tool? Or is it actually inevitable that people will use a tool to produce garbage?
So I'm not understanding your point.