I know this is a low quality comment, but given I was once the guy at my last company who's job it was to make React do things it didn't want to, I really dislike React. It's a dead end for interactive UIs, and the closer you can stay to native html elements with encapsulation, the better off you'll be later down the road.
You can use native html elements with react. I'm curious what it is you were trying to do since I'm sure you could do anything native html supports with react.
I do think that React has a chance at beating this trend though. As Rails became more and more esoteric with DSLs, utility functions, and `method_missing` hacks that make complex existing monolith codebases nearly inscrutable, and microservices became a preferred way to "throw bodies" at similarly complex codebases, it's not surprising that people started moving away.
React's ecosystem, on the other hand, has embraced strong typing (and alongside it, tooling that lets you drill deep into any method you see on the screen), and it's fully compatible with teams working on discrete backend and frontend components. It's not likely to disappear any time soon, the same way jQuery hasn't disappeared. Yes, it adds a performance cost, but so long as Zawinski's Law holds [0], functional state-to-display-object transformations will continue to be the paradigm, and React continues to lead the pack there. And if new display object abstractions come into play (say, React Native in-browser rendering widgets on the GPU directly via webasm or new browser-specific APIs), React can and will adapt.
