No, it wasn't. Now it is an engineering process.
> I started using Next.js in 2017. It made React a real production framework
In 2017 I had React projects in production for years.
> React was hard to setup and maintain and hard to make it go fast (on first load)
And it only got worse and the overengineering to make it looks fast in the first load is not worth it as modern JS frameworks are faster than React out-of-the-box.
> I don't think it ruined React at all. I think it helped React gain in popularity
That's not what stackoverflow's Insights says[0]. Looks like a free fall for me.