Comment by davnicwil

I think absurd is a bit strong. It'd be absurd to call something like rails a library.

I think you can probably see that distinction already, but to spell it out React is described as a library precisely because it does just one thing - the view - and leaves it to you to figure out the entirety of the rest of the stack / structure of your app.

Framework, at least to me, but I also believe commonly, means something that lets you build a full application end to end using it.

You can't do that with React unless your app is just something that lives in the browser either in-memory or with some localstorage backing or something. If that's your app, then probably I'd agree React is your framework per se, but that's hardly ever the case.

By the way, back to my original point, I still do think these things are impossible to define and in lots of ways these terms don't matter - if it's a framework for you, it's a framework - but I just had to defend my position since you described it as absurd :-)