React (and NPM for that matter) is not all web development, in the same way that Windows is not the only OS.

Vanilla JavaScript these days is an absolute joy to code in (and highly performant compared to the past). Even lazy-loading modules are supported natively by the browser these days - you can go a long way just using purely built-in default functionality.

I avoid NPM and React, and live my professional life quite happily without them doing professional development using typescript and angular with bazel. For fun home projects there is deno which is also lovely. Bun looks interesting but appears to want to ape NPM so it is a no from me.