Over the years, I'm seeing more and more unlearning of fundamental web from new frontend devs forged in boot camps.
On the other hand, with something like react-router you can now just download the full page content[2] but without <head> [3], and then make the browser re-draw only the parts that changed.
Only half-joking though. People can build things whatever way they like, and these frameworks can have good trade-offs. But sometimes the justifications devs give[4] just sound like they're reluctant to say "because I already know it, so I'm more efficient with it" or something like that.
[1]: "Paint holding".
[2]: Code splitting.
[3]: These savings are probably offset by the library's 19kB, anyway. Or with that small icon that was inlined as base64.
[4]: Which they don't need to give to anyone, unless it's for a situation like an employer asking for it.
As far as I can tell, React let's you write HTML in both the right and wrong ways, like all frameworks (including plain JS).
Maybe it seems like React is worse in terms of HTML because of how popular it is? There are more users of it, so more potential examples of bad HTML?
I think you have hit the nail on the head.
React can use links and still be dynamic. The problem is without it, you break the browser history, you break long press menu on mobile, you lose the link preview in the status bar.