I am "the react guy" -- but before that I built knockout applications with requirejs & angular applications with coffeescript and gulp, and before that with a 2000 line long script.js & jquery ;)
I don't really disagree with anything you said, except to point out that a lot of the current crop of web devs have never experienced what it is to build an app without any abstraction such as React, and quite understandably have no idea what problems it is doing for them.
I do know that since hopping onto react with all of that ~baggage~ context, I have never wanted to program UIs with a different model. It is true that hooks introduce a layer of abstraction that is sometimes difficult to reason about, but IMO they boil down the problems we faced with class components/lifecycle/server rendering gotchas, and put them front and center - forcing you to confront and fix them rather than settling for a solution that works 99% of the time.
I don't really disagree with anything you said, except to point out that a lot of the current crop of web devs have never experienced what it is to build an app without any abstraction such as React, and quite understandably have no idea what problems it is doing for them.
I do know that since hopping onto react with all of that ~baggage~ context, I have never wanted to program UIs with a different model. It is true that hooks introduce a layer of abstraction that is sometimes difficult to reason about, but IMO they boil down the problems we faced with class components/lifecycle/server rendering gotchas, and put them front and center - forcing you to confront and fix them rather than settling for a solution that works 99% of the time.