> Not sure how exactly React became so standard, but I'd assume it was a combination of the backing of Facebook and the frustration with performance and developer UX of Angular, which was most popular at that time.

I believe React became so standard because it provides the right abstraction for managing GUIs expressed as a tree of compostable UI components and controls that are automatically updated when it's underlying view model is updated. It's approach is so well-suited to the problem domain.

I frankly do not understand why Next.js managed to get any traction at all. I dare say that it was kind of forced upon the whole world with create-react-app dropping out of favour and newbies looking to quickly create barebones React projects.