My position isn't that we should be using a new library per se. It's that we should be more selective about what 3rd party code we use and espescially what we ship to end users. React has tended towards a kitchen sink approach and this is exacerbated by initial design shortcomings/decisions i.e. no built in state management or method for encapsulating styles has lead to a deluge of libraries that promise to fill the gaps, none of which quite work with one another. This I guess is why we've seen the rise of meta-frameworks like Next which fill this gaps in a predictable way. But these just meta frameworks just shift developers another step further from the underlying HTML/CSS/JS making it harder to debug things and harder to fix issues when you stray from the framework's happy path.
(All that said, I don't blame people for choosing React for certain classes of projects, the economics of hiring new devs, the relative maturity and stability , the large community etc all make for powerful incentives to choose React)
Sorry, reading this back I see where that might be confusing.
It's a few days later now but I think I was referring to React in the round as deployed in the real world, the community norms etc. rather than just the core library. In my experience the way that React projects tend to develop is that "tried and tested" libraries get added to to solve particular issues, most commonly state and styling (codified in meta-frameorks like NextJS etc.) but also UI transitions, wrappers around common non-react libraries like Leaflet or threeJS etc. The reason being that it's actually quite hard to sensibly integrate vanila JS libraries into a React code base so if someone has done the hard work why would you not use that. But of course this comes at a cost. More recent libraries (in my experience svelte but i understand this is a common feature) mitigate the issue by 1. having a builtin approach to state and styling 2. making it easier to drop down to the underlying HTML/CSS/JS without making a mess.
(All that said, I don't blame people for choosing React for certain classes of projects, the economics of hiring new devs, the relative maturity and stability , the large community etc all make for powerful incentives to choose React)