People hate on React because it's popular. That popularity alienates people whose use cases aren't served well by React and they wonder what the fuss is about.

But React is really, really good at the thing it was designed for: building interactive UIs. You can even build native apps. Can you build a native app in htmx?

Most of the alternatives to React are simplifying alternatives. They aim to take complexity away in order to solve a subset of basic use cases with less ceremony. Sure, if you have uncomplicated needs then use whatever solves your problem, web components, HTMX, Jinja, plain HTML, markdown: go as low as you like down the hierarchy and choose the simplest thing that could possibly work.

But nobody as of yet has built an alternative to React that can solve the difficult use cases better than React. Au contraire, React has moved into domains that it was never even designed for. Native apps. Terminal apps. That's the power of a good abstraction.