One vital distinction is that even if you define 100 components, nothing will happen unless you call .render from react-dom. Nothing is automatically setup for you.

Compare that to Laravel or anything else that is obviously a framework. You write code and put it in a file in the right place, and it gets picked up automatically, most of the time.

This makes me still consider React a library, rather than a framework. But then there are tons of frameworks that uses React, nextjs is probably one of the more common ones.