> I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself.

That doesn't mean that those merits don't exist. Most of the new React competitors are just reinventions of HTML templating done client-side. React has been dominant for so long that there's a whole generation of frontend devs who don't remember why it was invented in the first place. Writing loops in HTML? We tried that, it sucks!

It's telling that the "new" frameworks have no ideas other than to revert to ideas that were tried in the past. React is so modern it makes its replacements feel dated.