One reason people reach for the "big guns" is also career progression. Hell, I started learning React recently precisely because of that: I prefer to touch the Web as little as possible, but everything is now eaten by SPAs, so one may as well just bite the bullet and get ready for the next job... The same reasoning currently motivates all but one of my backend co-workers, they're all learning React now. At my previous job (backend/desktop), people too started to learn Angular and React, just to jump on the (perceivably) safer, and much better paid, career path.