"Slowing innovation across the frontend ecosystem" sounds like a really good idea to me. Frontend innovation is largely vanity churn at this point, and means that any web frontend project left fallow for more than six months is effectively dead, since you need to constantly update for security reasons, and the API and the dependencies are constantly changing, you are doomed to rewrite your application forever. The only sensible motivation I can see for this is the desire to create jobs for life for frontend devs.

Compare this with things like X11 or Win32, where 20 year old programs will still work, or even more so systems like OS/360 and its successors, where 50 year old programs will still work.

I'm not a fan of React - to put it mildly - but something mediocre, but stable, is vastly preferable to the rapidly mutating hellscape of constantly rewritten frameworks driven by innovation for innovation's sake.