> I did. It's kind of funny to hear that you cannot even entertain the idea that people actually did declarative UIs before React with plain old vanilla JS

By you I meant "collective you". I don't care what individual developers did that no one knows about.

> Just because some frameworks were prevalent at the time didn't mean that everyone used them.

    define: prevalent

    1 : generally or widely accepted, practiced, or favored : widespread

    2 : being in ascendancy : dominant

> Large portion .. upto ... flexible about this today

Bears little to no relevance on the discussion

> React wasn't anything revolutionary on the framework side of things.

Except, it was. It upended the prevalent way of doing things and ushered in a new prevalent way of doing things.

    define: reovultionary

    1 c : constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change

I did bring about a fundamental change: the prevalent way of doing things on the web changed.

> It's not as simple as "React bad/React good".

Of course it's not. But we're not discussing whether it's bad or good.

> it's just non black-and-white thinking.

So far your "non black and white thinking" is "everything React has was done better befroe React, but I can't show anything to prove this except some disparate things that are both complex and esoteric, and I can also go on a prolonged discourse about how some developers don't use frameworks and may have done things a la React before React".