It’s not making up history. There is a documentary[0] on the history of React where the people involved in its creation and use at Facebook described it this way:
> Bolt [a predecessor of React] was basically more or less Facebook's implementation of a client-side MVC. [It was] not a tool belt, it was truly an application development framework. Something designed and meant to build complicated interactive rich apps and was being used to build pretty complicated very real products at Facebook at the time. […] As the product itself got more complex and as we added more engineers to the team, we didn't hit a wall but it started to get really, really hard to make changes. And that was around the time that Jordan [Walke, creator of React] was on the ads team and he's like ‘I wonder, there's got to be a better way’. […] Jordan was a product engineer at the time, working on ads, and ads has one of the most complicated pieces of UI across all of Facebook at the moment. On the ads team they were hitting the limits of what you can do without React complexity wise. […] Jordan had a lot of very interesting ideas around how you could take what we had done in Bolt and make it easier for it to scale with people's ability to understand large applications.
As the GP said, React was explicitly designed to solve the problem of having many engineers writing large, complex, client-side applications. It was not designed for building simple web sites.
There is no need to imbue meaning into quotes or history when there is a clear, well defined timeline with striking examples of how React was used to generate static website all the way from its initial release.
> Bolt [a predecessor of React] was basically more or less Facebook's implementation of a client-side MVC. [It was] not a tool belt, it was truly an application development framework. Something designed and meant to build complicated interactive rich apps and was being used to build pretty complicated very real products at Facebook at the time. […] As the product itself got more complex and as we added more engineers to the team, we didn't hit a wall but it started to get really, really hard to make changes. And that was around the time that Jordan [Walke, creator of React] was on the ads team and he's like ‘I wonder, there's got to be a better way’. […] Jordan was a product engineer at the time, working on ads, and ads has one of the most complicated pieces of UI across all of Facebook at the moment. On the ads team they were hitting the limits of what you can do without React complexity wise. […] Jordan had a lot of very interesting ideas around how you could take what we had done in Bolt and make it easier for it to scale with people's ability to understand large applications.
As the GP said, React was explicitly designed to solve the problem of having many engineers writing large, complex, client-side applications. It was not designed for building simple web sites.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pDqJVdNa44