people love to hate react, and it's fair most of the times. it takes way too much effort just to make things look decent without a mountain of tech debt.
with plain html or those meta-frameworks, it feels way more chill: you just write the content, style it up, and boom. no existential crisis over component trees or state management.
but here’s the twist: i still end up using react (usually next.js) for most projects. i feel like it scales pretty well (for 0 users) and is overall pretty fun to write.