I imagine the career growth would have happened regardless of which framework became the new hotness. That is, any framework with similar usage/growth would have done the same. I've just seen the pattern too many times.
A whole webdev cohort came up on and with these technologies, were taken seriously because of their mastery of them, and have moved into areas of tech and engineering that would have been absolutely off-limits to "mere" html/css developers.
I'm not willing to claim that react alone made that happen, but it's not at all clear to me that it would have without react having the timing, momentum, and cachet that it has.
Loads of people board the train at the most recent stop and are amazed how "fast" it's going.
At least with surfing all the waves are different - in web-tech it feels like the same wave over and over.
Just wait (shakes cane) it'll happen to you too.
Prototype and Script.aculo.us? I remembered being in Prototype camp because I deemed jQuery to be too different (and in a hindsight, that was one of my worst decision in tech)
There's also YUI, MooTools, etc.
Yes. Thank you!