> The old react docs used to quip that react was the v of mvc, until this notion was scraped entirely

I'm still treating React as the "V of MVC", other things handled by other things, and seems I'm not alone with this.

I think at one point React got so popular, and the team grew, so they figured they need to expand the scope for it to continue growing, and Facebook continued to throw resources at it, and as we know, things that don't change are clearly dead (sarcasm), so APIs changed, the scope grew and eventually they stopped marketing it as the view-layer, and instead push it as a full thing, when it still clearly was just a view library, not a framework.