This. React was incredibly innovative at a time where the alternatives were some combination of:

* Two-way data binding spaghetti

* Boilerplate-heavy reactivity

* Opaque, framework-specific magic

* Manual state updates/transitions

React didn't win "by default" (whatever that means), it won because it was better than most of the other options at the time.

I agree that, on purely technical grounds, it isn't as strong of a framework as other competitors anymore, but React is and has always been Good Enough™ for most companies, to the point that it's not worth reaching for anything else most of the time. And I say this as someone who doesn't like most things about modern React.