React is fine per se, the problem is throwing these "simple, magic" solutions onto everything, without even caring what mountains of code end up running as a result. The minimum for a Discourse installation is 10 GB, for example, but PHP is the weird ecosystem, because reasons. I don't mean to pick on Discourse, but that's still crazy to me.
It's like driving a huge truck everywhere, even to get the mail from our mailbox, because it starts up real fast and we don't have it far to the garage from our living rooms, and then later on because we haven't walked in so long, we don't even remember what it is. And especially with websites, people also tend to forget that their website isn't the only thing anyone ever runs on their machine, some have to share resources with dozens of tabs.
I've been experimenting with Vue and I'm liking it more and more just for the simplicity.