For me the biggest reason I prefer Svelte over React is the ecosystem.

When I was in the React world, the ecosystem felt closed and bloated (although I thought it was one of the biggest). For every task, there's a specific react-this or react-that library, which often comes with lot of technical debts and complexities. I think there are over 100 libraries just meant to solve state management - yet react devs are proud of that.

Svelte is a breath of fresh air for me. If a feature isn't built-in, I can usually just use a standard, framework-agnostic js library from npm.

I think this is better for everyone - developers get simpler, more robust tools, and library authors don't have to constantly maintain React-specific wrappers.

This advantage is compounded by React's frequent API changes, which make it difficult to keep up.

And I believe there many incredible react developers comfortable with the current setup in the React ecosystem, but I find Svelte's approach to be far more elegant and simpler.