I was speaking directly to the reactive framework itself (which is a smart way to get around some limitations), the div salad it pushes developers to sustain, and the fact that they felt they had to rewrite HTML such that instead of typing <h2> devs have to type something like <Heading.

HTML is a pretty simple markup language and abstracting from it doesn't seem to make any sense.

And I think your theory about what I mean by "classic web design" is probably right; keeping the JS separate from mark-up is one example of how I wish I could go back in time.

But I can't. So it's time to learn to manage people who want to go this direction.

Meta wrote React for Facebook mainly, and most other projects won't touch that scale. In my organization's case it's like we're water-skiing behind an aircraft carrier. It's the wrong tool for the job, and having three people manage 37k lines of code (excluding libraries) is tough.