Sorry, reading this back I see where that might be confusing. It's a few days later now but I think I was referring to React in the round as deployed in the real world, the community norms etc. rather than just the core library. In my experience the way that React projects tend to develop is that "tried and tested" libraries get added to to solve particular issues, most commonly state and styling (codified in meta-frameorks like NextJS etc.) but also UI transitions, wrappers around common non-react libraries like Leaflet or threeJS etc. The reason being that it's actually quite hard to sensibly integrate vanila JS libraries into a React code base so if someone has done the hard work why would you not use that. But of course this comes at a cost. More recent libraries (in my experience svelte but i understand this is a common feature) mitigate the issue by 1. having a builtin approach to state and styling 2. making it easier to drop down to the underlying HTML/CSS/JS without making a mess.