I mean, that means someone at your work liked React enough to choose it over the alternatives.

I see a lot of personal projects, solo founder applications etc running made in React. I respect your opinion but other people definitely do choose it when they have fully control of what they use.

Most decision-makers make decisions based on what they already know. Most of my colleagues only know React, because they've only been exposed to React. Why do you think Java dominates the market still? React solved a huge problem when it was new, and it still solves that problem fine (change detection - the reactivity model). There are better alternatives available now (Vue - signals), but the difference isn't big enough to create a new monoculture. Sure there are peripheral concerns like how mature the ecosystem is or the particular ergonomics of a framework, but these are mostly fluff.

That doesn’t mean they like it now, and more importantly it doesn’t mean it was actually the best choice at the time.

I used to be on a team that used Mongo for a relational database because Mongo was trendy at one time. So all joins had to be done in the application layer.