I'm not that familiar with React (although I have had the misfortune of working with Angular), but I've seen the horrific Spring "framework" defended that way: it doesn't actually include any functionality because it's designed to be open ended! What it turns out to be is the most useless thing that ever happened to programming: it's pure overhead, undocumented (surprising) behavior, unwanted defaults that you have to spend time working around without the benefit of actually simplifying anything. Not saying React is the same (like I said, haven't really spent much time looking at it), but it's adherents defend it the same way Spring's adherents defend it.