Look at your computer. Are all its parts and pieces strictly necessary to display the text "Hello world" on your screen? No. Why don't you throw it away and buy something simpler, then?

Sure, but if you want to use React to build a Hello World app, the framework is not the one I would blame for overengineering.

I find it curious that we always see these opinions expressed about front end frameworks, but no one seems to have much problem with all of the complexity in back end frameworks like node, Python, Java, .Net... I have a sneaking suspicion that people are just more used to having complexity hidden from them behind a framework install, whereas front end puts everything front and center since it's all delivered to your project via npm.