Bashing react today is like bashing Java in ~2010.
There are some valid criticisms of react but a lot of them want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, much like with many other mature technologies.
I celebrate people who can produce something innovative in the web development world, but at least produce something before making these grand claims while bashing what came before. Those abstractions are there for good reasons!
Why? Because the code quality is bad? Or there's just so much code?
I submitted one PR to React like 10 years ago. The maintainers were quite pleasant to work with and it wasn't too hard to figure out what I needed to do.
That feels more like bashing Redux or one of the state management libraries. That's where I've seen a lot of complexity sneak in.
The only similarity is that it is/was popular to bash both. The reasons for bashing and utility of each are vastly different.
And a lot of that bashing comes from people who don't understand React or the ecosystem it's part of.