These disagreements almost always boil down to one side saying "some people use React to build content-oriented websites" and the other side saying "but most of us are building web applications".
In a typical web application use case (yes, there are exceptions) you're only rarely looking at usage from old or cheap Android devices. Occasionally you'll see a tablet, but even that's rare. The vast majority of the time your users are on either Chrome or Safari on a relatively modern Mac or Windows machine. In many cases the application loads once at the start of at least 10+ minutes of work, so initial load times rarely matter much.
If you're building a website that needs SEO, then yeah, React is completely the wrong tool, and you should just make a proper static site or hook your marketing team up with WordPress (or whatever takes its place once Matt is finished blowing it up). But those use cases, while common, represent a tiny fraction of total engineering effort across the industry, so most web developers here don't have the design constraints that make React a bad choice.
I would also add that even in that last scenario React can be a great tool, there are many solutions that use React but make fully static exports (Nextjs/astro/gatsby/etc).
Pre-rendering everything has downsides of course, but it doesn't get much faster than that.
I think it's also a misconception that there is such a clear divide between app and content-oriented websites. Even the most content heavy websites, news sites for example, are highly interactive these days. Show me a popular content heavy site that doesn't have some sort of log in, interactive content, comment section, filtering, live blogs, alerts, notifications, search, and similar.
You also have to take into account the advantages of pre-fetching links, and only fetching and replacing the content instead of doing full page re-renders. All of these great things you can do easily with React and a React framework of your choice. You can even go further and have a hybrid of statically exported pages, SSR, and some SPA like highly interactive parts, reusing the same exact components in all these strategies.
All to say: React can be a great choice for a lot of use cases, also for content heavy websites.
The top sites using react are all e-commerce or social sites. I would bet the majority of react sites and devs that use them are not building apps that require SPA or something like React. Which is the problem.
> I would bet the majority of react sites and devs that use them are [n]ot building apps that require SPA or something like React. [edited to restore what I assume is the ended meaning]
On what basis do you bet this, though?
Sure, you see sites that bug you by being slow in contexts where you'd choose something else, but most devs are working on sites and apps that you will never see, because you're not the target demographic.
I don't have survey data one way or the other, but anecdotally everywhere I've worked on an SPA has been a clear case where trying to do it in backend+JQuery would have been a huge failure.
But there is a wide gulf between backend + JQuery and SPA. The frustration often shown is people treating the extremes as the only options available. Having a use case for which backend + jQuery doesn't cut it doesn't require reinventing navigation state and history in JS, or loading every stat on the page via JSON. There are middle grounds.
What middle ground do you propose that's as efficient to get rolling as React in 2024? You talk about not reinventing state and history in JS, but at this point the reinvention is already done and React is the pragmatic choice that you pick when you don't want to reinvent the frontend.
There are a bunch of stacks that I prefer to work in for my own projects, but what I need at work is almost always the standard option that everyone is already used to.
In a typical web application use case (yes, there are exceptions) you're only rarely looking at usage from old or cheap Android devices. Occasionally you'll see a tablet, but even that's rare. The vast majority of the time your users are on either Chrome or Safari on a relatively modern Mac or Windows machine. In many cases the application loads once at the start of at least 10+ minutes of work, so initial load times rarely matter much.
If you're building a website that needs SEO, then yeah, React is completely the wrong tool, and you should just make a proper static site or hook your marketing team up with WordPress (or whatever takes its place once Matt is finished blowing it up). But those use cases, while common, represent a tiny fraction of total engineering effort across the industry, so most web developers here don't have the design constraints that make React a bad choice.