> some of which were more popular and lost (jQuery, Backbone)

Don't forget about having a migration path. I don't know how common it was (or how messy it might be, I never did this myself), but before Redux became popular, people were using Backbone models as the datastore for React. So existing Backbone-based apps had a way to piecemeal migrate to React.

Upvoted despite your final sentence being incorrect. :-) You're absolutely right that React is miles better than Angular, but Svelte and Vue (which feel very similar to each other, I just switched from one project written in Svelte to a different project written in Vue and a lot of my knowledge is carrying over) are quite a lot easier than React. When I write in React I have to think about the hooks and when I'm initializing them; when I write in Svelte or Vue the $state/ref() systems just work and I don't have to think about them. I can even initialize a $state inside an if block if I need to; I admit I'm no React expert, so I should ask you. If you needed to create a piece of state inside an if block in React, how would you do it? Is the only answer "Move the hook call outside the if block, and just don't use it if the if block doesn't run"?

It won by marketing and the angularjs to Angular breaking change. If they kept going with angularjs or had an upgrade path react wouldn't be default in the enterprise stack. That's all on Google.

Meteor was node framework. jQuery is probably still more popular but it is only a lib. Vue had a Chinese language problem.

React won because a framework by Facebook felt safe.

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I'm working with a large Angular app, and my dev experience has been abysmal. TS language server running out of memory, Angular language server frequently crashes or freezes leaving weird half line diagnostics in its wake. Go to definitions are so slow in the proje too.

I've worked on 2x, if not 3x larger React codebase without these issues. I can't tell a single instance where language tooling was failing me so severely that I've contemplated turning it off because it's creating more uncertainty than its helping.

I'm relatively new to Angular 20 itself—only used Angular 1, and also migrated that project to React. So I'm not yet qualified to make big statements about it (but a preliminary gut feeling is that it often feels complex in the wrong places). C'est la vie though

Same here. I started learning React when the official angular way of migrating gradually didn’t work at all on my code base, while I was able to use a “react in angular” thing to migrate components one by one. Crazy times

Yes, but when React launched, 1.x was its main competition. We started to incorporate React into parts of our app that needed better performance, and found ourselves using it for essentially all our new projects. It was quick to pick up, made apps easier to reason about, and had much more performant DOM updates. Angular's two-way binding made for flashy demos, but quickly became a leaky abstraction for complex pages with lots of updates.

That was in 2013. Angular 2 came out in 2016, and by that point React had won. Have had to dabble in other frameworks since then, and none of them seem to do anything significantly better than React. I spent my early career learning a new FE framework every year, at this point I'm happy to have something boring that does what I need and has a great ecosystem around it.

React's benefit was absolutely technical. Its component model and one-way data binding was so much simpler to reason about and elegant than Angular. So much so that they ended up copying it in Aungular 1.6 and Angular 2.x.

One of the biggest criticisms at the time (And perhaps still now) was that it wasn't opinionated at all. It didn't make assumptions as to how to do routing, or to fetch data, or to handle state. The community eventually converged towards a handful of solutions, like redux, but it was easy for each project to have its own combination of flavours and patterns.

Angular was an all-batteries-included MVC framework, with DI, testing framework, and one true way to do things. The reason why it's harder to introduce very low quality code in React is because React is just functions, returning JSX, executing when the function parameters change.

On the other hand, angular had comically large footguns due to its very high complexity. Have a look at the legacy documentation, the page about "scopes" by itself is longer and introduces more concepts than the entire "Thinking in react" page.