> only simple sites where the guys before me chose React, so I can't speak to its relative strengths or weaknesses there, but I've found that it doesn't scale down very well to simple sites.

I agree completely, my whole career I've been building webapps, as in like software that really couldn't be server side rendered, such as very interactive charting and table applications or games (that didn't require Canvas and could work in DOM but needed lots of reactivity, such as a SQL query builder game or a terminal emulator game), where react works decently. Vue worked fine and so did backbone/marionette, whatever, a framework is a framework is a framework, React has a lot of libraries I can just chuck in to get a date picker or whatever so I use it.

Anyway, I would never build anything that can be server-rendered in react. Simple forms, e-commerce, blogs, portfolios, anything like that I'm just writing in HTML or Django or Hugo or hell, Wordpress. I tried out Astro for a blog just to pick up the framework and didn't understand why on earth I needed all this insane boilerplate to render Markdown files. Hugo solved that problem. If I need more complex than that, Vite + react, done.

I feel like there's a lot of devs out there that are using react cause they like the devx "nice to haves" that they're used to e.g. hooks or whatever, when they really don't need them for their page.