Why? React’s component model can be an excellent abstraction for building a “normal website”—or rather, its component parts—for developers who prefer it. React can compile to static HTML, without running any JS client side, and/or can be used to mount or hydrate arbitrary subtrees however one sees fit. (I’d probably favor Preact or Solid for the latter, but React is a perfectly cromulent choice)

What would be the right tool for an entertaining highly interactive and animated (game-like, but still mostly text based) thing then? Used to be Java applets and Flash. Now is "webapps" and WebGL.

Or is that it should have been handrolled using CSS animations and framework-less JS?

Or is it more that we're acting like it's 1995 and the web is for reading text documents only, and anything other than that is nerd blasphemy? (Not saying you're saying this, but it is something some still press; they hate the web stack being used in other ways).

did you even look at their site? the last thing i would call it is a "normal website"