I can't speak for other people; I can only speak for myself. I was an early adopter of React (around 0.12) and wasn't particularly interested in, or technical enough, to understand the "cool" things. I wasn't swayed by "hot reloading" or "virtual dom diffing" -- I didn't have a build setup that could hot reload, and I also did not even understand what the virtual dom was. But when I looked at its code samples, React answered my three basic concerns very clearly, in an obvious way:
1. Component based architecture
2. The ability to express view as a pure function of state
3. The ability to express HTML and code together in a neat and ergonomic way
This is what I mean by obvious -- all experienced frontend engineers I knew at the time immediately got it, they got that React nailed these three things, and why they were important. Surprisingly, even new frameworks don't always lead with these three principles, which makes me less likely to believe that they resolve the particular concerns that I find of most importance.
1. Component based architecture
2. The ability to express view as a pure function of state
3. The ability to express HTML and code together in a neat and ergonomic way
This is what I mean by obvious -- all experienced frontend engineers I knew at the time immediately got it, they got that React nailed these three things, and why they were important. Surprisingly, even new frameworks don't always lead with these three principles, which makes me less likely to believe that they resolve the particular concerns that I find of most importance.