Yes I agree, React broke that mould and web apps are better for it.

But it was controversial. The React team even got ridiculed early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY#t=35s

And the person who wrote that tweet wasn't alone. It's perhaps easy to forget how much opposition there was to React. Facebook was quite a bit further than many in the industry, and Pete Hunt from Facebook admits that "we weren't communicating what we were doing".

It was a bit much to swallow for many at first, but in the end, the VDOM was such a powerful idea that React was destined to take off sooner or later.