Maybe for web applications.

There should be something in the license of JavaScript frameworks & libraries to prevent them from being used in blogs, newspapers, trade publications etc :-/

For now all innovations in JS just seems to provide us with even heavier web sites for no real benefits. I feel I'm starting to dislike JS the way I disliked Flash which would be quite a feat.

I agree—I loathe frontend development, but React made it tolerable to do for limited periods—but it's still a hack on a teetering Jenga tower of hacks.

I echo -- this is good advice. Pick the minimal set of tools you need to use react and css modules (this probably means banging your head against something like webpack for more time than you can possibly enjoy) - but with those pieces alone as starting point, you don't really need a lot of additional library support to build applications that run in browsers ... and your code should start to seem understandable/predictable -- in a manner reminiscent of using better native frameworks of the past.

Unlike many other web programming approaches -- this stack should help avoid the need to invent new hacks for every new feature or slightly different situation ...

From a javascript point of view, React is great, but I wholeheartedly disagree on the CSS modules. What React did here breaks the whole purpose of CSS, even if it is messy, not to mention that now designers need to have help from programmers to do their job. IMHO, it is much better to user Sass to make CSS sane, and just do whatever makes life easier on the frontend. I feel something light like Backbone.Native with a Shadow/Virtual DOM system is a superior system in this sense.

IMO react is a big step backwards. Adding an abstraction layer almost never produces a better result, it just makes things more complicated.