It’s an absolutely not true that react is especially bad for this behavior.

I think that lots of more traditional websites have very poor back button designs, especially around editing and form submissions. Remember clicking back and the browser prompting for form resubmission? Very poor design since you have no clue how the server will even handle form submissions. Or getting stuck deep in an application, hard to get back to the root. Or, consider encoding current page data that you’re editing into the URL, and back buttons don’t return to root and just strip query params. Often a very frustrating experience.

Often, “go back to what I was doing before” is what I actually want, not “go strictly to the previous state in the URL bar.”

Sure, plenty of people mess that up too, but the reality is that controlling the navigation stack can help you build more useful designs.