I mean if they hadn't constantly reinvented the wheel by refusing to learn about existing technologies, and if they hadn't then effectively forced web dev garbage on the rest of the programming world via their sheer numbers, then they might not have earned such contempt. See React in the Windows start menu or Claude's CLI being written in React as two of the most egregious examples (but one of only many).

As I saw someone here on HN describe it a year or two ago, it's like mayflies debating politics.

Worth noting it's not web devs pushing for React in the Windows start menu. It's PMs looking at the problem and concluding React is the least painful way to solve it (correctly or incorrectly, but I doubt they optimize for the same measurements you do).

Ink (the React renderer) in Claude code, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense for interactive CLIs where you want to componentize your menus and dialogs. Actually not using a component framework normally ends up in state / render chaos.

Re: mayflies debating politics: React has been there for 13 years, and while the interface has shifted a couple of times (object factories to classes to functions), the main idea has always been really simple and really stable: isolated declarative components that can optionally have state and side effects. Many other popular frameworks have come and gone in the meantime.