It's just a little bit more coherent platform than React. There are core Vue projects, and they go in lockstep with Vue releases.

Second, Vue understood how fragile, and the same time important tooling is. There are many very mature Vue packages to scaffold, and manage your Webpack, or other build system setup for you. This saves a lot of hours because if this setup fails on you, it will also fail on tens of thousands other developers, and will get fixed quickly.

Vue itself been less tooling dependent at the start, and it played a role it its early popularity, vs React, which was superglued to Webpack or something similar from the start. Now, the situation has reversed I think, and it is a pain point.

I think there is a good sense of direction with Vue, with Evan being better at keeping focus on objectives for the next release than a lot of other frameworks developed by companies. I had few silent breakages during updating projects to new version.

Lastly, Evan is a very decent person, and this helps the project getting more contributors.