Comment by johnfn
Yes, this is probably the wrongest statement. When React was launched, it was one in a pool of thousands of web frameworks. For any axis you want to claim that React won by "default", there was another framework that dominated React in that axis and lost anyways. Some frameworks had more resources and lost (Angular), some of which were more popular and lost (jQuery, Backbone), and some of which were even more hyped than React and lost (remember Meteor?).
React didn't win by default, it won because developers tried it and found it was better. It absolutely won on technical merit.
There's a bit of a question of whether React would still win on technical merit today, versus all the next-generation frameworks. I personally think it is still better than Svelte, Vue, etc, but I'm a bit of a React apologist.
Upvoted despite your final sentence being incorrect. :-) You're absolutely right that React is miles better than Angular, but Svelte and Vue (which feel very similar to each other, I just switched from one project written in Svelte to a different project written in Vue and a lot of my knowledge is carrying over) are quite a lot easier than React. When I write in React I have to think about the hooks and when I'm initializing them; when I write in Svelte or Vue the $state/ref() systems just work and I don't have to think about them. I can even initialize a $state inside an if block if I need to; I admit I'm no React expert, so I should ask you. If you needed to create a piece of state inside an if block in React, how would you do it? Is the only answer "Move the hook call outside the if block, and just don't use it if the if block doesn't run"?