React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences
I see a lot of personal projects, solo founder applications etc running made in React. I respect your opinion but other people definitely do choose it when they have fully control of what they use.
I used to be on a team that used Mongo for a relational database because Mongo was trendy at one time. So all joins had to be done in the application layer.
Secondly, when someone new asks me what web framework to learn, I tell them React. And the main reason, every time, is that this is more likely to get them a job, i.e., inertia.
We got here somehow. Clearly, React didn't get here purely on momentum, and must have done something less poorly than the other frameworks. But I think it's hard to deny that inertia plays a big role in its current popularity.
I think you get me now but I'm just merely stating the stickiness and trendiness of these architecture decisions. Some other people mention this but just because a majority of the industry works on something doesn't mean it is the best.
I am a bit of the proof of this. I work on Angular at Google and have for a long time. It is kind of comical because I have worked on a few side projects outside of Google and I always use Angular, I know it too well.
I built a massive Angular webapp recently (2025) outside of Google and have had multiple people approach me about migrating it to React. They come at me like this is some old thing that needs to be refactored to unlock the modern times. It's just curious, there are large groups of people that don't really even understand what they are doing, they are just chasing words and hype. Mind you, there are reasons to pick one framework over the other still... but let's at least debate that instead of just the names of frameworks. React has won the framework adoption race so I can't argue much there.