I contracted on a few different projects over a few years, with React involved in all of them. Each team had their way of doing something, and goodness me... each team I joined was way different than the previous one with respect to approach, style, testing, etc. And anything I did that was "wrong" (meaning, not to their particular approach), I was ... belittled or talked down to as if I was some imbecile. In a couple cases, I used an approach with company B that they'd discarded a year before, but 6 months earlier, my work with company A's team led us down adopting that same approach, with decent results. But company B knew better, saying that approach was 'crap' (but... looking at their own internal docs, 2 years earlier, it was the hottest approach).

I was shocked at how much time some teams spent on reinventing wheels rather than using some off the shelf components. "We need everything to be done in house so we can document it and have full control". But... designing all your own widgets is going to take months. "React makes it easy though, so don't worry - we know what we're doing' Yet... they didn't - untestable components that couldn't support what the original requirements called for months earlier, etc.

You know how people crap on PHP because there's so much 'bad' PHP out there? But others say "it's just how you use it - frameworks XYZ are great!". I feel the same way about React. There's probably some great examples out there, but I somehow tend to see a lot of lesser quality stuff.

Most of the use cases I've seen up close... there wasn't any real magic or benefit to React vs something else, but everyone was jacked to get more React experience on their resume for their next gig. It didn't really matter if the resulting output was good or not, just that they used React.

I don't hate React - it's a library. I'm tired of much of the B-team players requiring it to be considered "professional" (while simultaneously) eschewing testing and documentation).

For people who have chosen it, and get to stay on the same project for several years, honing their skills on one codebase and iteratively improving, great. Enjoy.