When I started building websites professionally (in 1998) we had an adage that people used all the time to talk about how to get traffic to your website: "content is king!" It was a play on the "cash is king" motto of small businesses I think. It was very accurate too; if you wanted traffic then you had to build a site people shared. Search engines were not as effective as they are today.

Then the web changed a bit. In 2005 to 2015 (ish) people transitioned from being consumers of web content to creators of that content. We called it "Web 2.0". Content was still king because people went to their favorite sites to create things that other people would read. But anyone with half a brain could see what was coming next.

Around 2015 people stopped making content for other people to spend time consuming and instead shifted to making content that was seen for as little time as was necessary for them to hit a 'like' button. 'Content' in any meaningful sense died. It became a sentence on Twitter, or a photo on Instagram, or a really short video on TikTok.

The entire premise that users go to websites for the content is nostalgia. That side of the internet is effectively dead (despite some noble and awesome attempts to keep it going, HN being an example). Today very few people get paid to build static content sites. If you're a web dev you're paid to build an app that enables people to do things in a browser - and yes, that means working with something like React. All web devs try to crowbar React into everything simply because that's what they're paid to do, and they're paid to do that because that's what users want to do. Railing against it is a waste of time. The Internet today is not same as the Internet of 25 years ago.