The "paleo influencer" comparison is interesting, but I think it actually works both ways here.
Yes, there's a temptation to romanticize the past and dismiss modern tools. But there's an equally strong tendency to assume that newer, more popular, and more widely-adopted automatically means better. React didn't just win on pure technical merit. It has Facebook's marketing muscle behind it, it became a hiring checkbox, and it created a self-reinforcing ecosystem where everyone learns it because everyone uses it.
The article isn't suggesting that a "huge global collective of the world's most talented engineers have been conned." It's asking a much more nuanced question: did all that effort actually move us forward, or did we just move sideways into different complexity?
Look at the two implementations in the article. They do the same thing. They're roughly the same length. After 15 years of React development, countless developer hours, and a massive ecosystem, we're not writing dramatically less code or solving the problem more elegantly. We're just solving it differently, with different tradeoffs.
Sometimes looking backward isn't about being a "retro-idealist," it's about questioning whether we added complexity without proportional benefit. The paleo diet people might be onto something when they point out that we over-engineered our food. Maybe we over-engineered our frameworks too.