For me, personally, React makes up too many new things just with potentially slight modification and thus adding unnecessary layers of complexity. Then it is incredibly painful if you're ever in a position to debug someone else's code when they were using react. It's not as bad as having to deal with graphQL but it's still pretty awful.
Unfortunately in web programming, an inordinate amount of time is spent on concentrating on the rendering side, messing around with the CSS/CSS framework, because thats what people see, and less on understanding state flow or the backend data model. That on top of deadlines, and have a recipe for disaster. It actually took me, a seasoned programmer with 15+ years professional experience, a few weeks to understand React one-way data binding to the degree that my UI did not have severe bugs.
But when you do have a nice component hierarchy, reasonable CSS and proper data flow mechanisms, its quite nice what it can accomplish, that would not almost unfathomable with Vanilla JS.
