React seemed like a bad idea when it came out, and a much worse idea once I started using it day to day. All of my personal projects use Svelte, and I finally, blessedly applied for a job recently where Svelte was their frontend framework of choice. htmx also felt great the one time I used it.

HTML, CSS and a scripting language inly for progressive enhancement are such beautiful, pure ideas, and learning frontend at the height of the web standards movement made me a partisan of using these technologies as intended. But these days, doing it that way feels like building a house with Japanese joinery techniques.