On HN in general there is a disdain for anything other than react, probably more people of Facebook generation and admiration of it's technology like open graph, react and few other products.
Based on personal usage of React, it's no easier than angular or any JS based framework like Vue (which in my view more sensible than react). You add state management, templates, router and 1000's of npm packages to do anything simple and react soon becomes an unmaintainable nightmare with emany vulnerabilities if you do not upgrade. An app is not just simple react but many of the npm packages (although it's true in general for JavaScript eco-system which is by default is insecure and maintenance nightmare unless there is an extra amount of work done to secure it).
Angular at least provide a decent complete single framework to work with and a unified documentation, there are issues with it, but react is same when you need any reasonable size app from it.
React gives you an easy start with false sense that it's easy, than becomes just too convoluted and complicated with the addition of different components as soon as app starts growing. Maintaining and upgrading apps based on react is very difficult as one version to another it introduces breaking changes. Angular had similar thing from angularjs to angular 2, but slowly they made it much better but letting compiler do more work.
Ivy tree shaking compiler will give a fight to upcoming compiler framework like svelte and keep the size smaller and may be in some cases much smaller than react app bundles, will wait for the benchmarks and size comparisons.
I am still waiting for a simpler way of developing web apps, elm looked very nice, but it is still far from ready for use in the same way as Angular or react yet.