I don't think even young devs think this way. More likely the writer is just being lazy, and filled in gaps in their own knowledge with faux history-salad.
Or they meant a different year, like 2015, when React-Native was released.
Poor things, they missed the glorious Macromedia Flash days...
I do miss the games from shockwave.com in its heyday
Was the same way in the jQuery days with equating it to JavaScript.
It's a compliment to the tech of how useful and prevalent it is.
It was Rails and React was maybe adopted more broadly after 2016