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.

If every other framework failed because of <insert reason here>, that does indeed sound like React won due to its own merits.

Google's incapable of sticking to anything good. Nobody gets promoted at Google maintaining a system. So somebody inevitably gets the idea to make a 2.0 which isn't backwards compatible, enabling them to do all sorts of bold promotion-worthy innovation. And inevitably 2.0 isn't very good. Even worse, it makes the entire ecosystem confusing and unhealthy.