I get your point, but to me it is about composition, not popularity. Writing UI as pure functions of state feels far more natural — recursion, higher-order patterns, dynamic layouts, all come easily because React is just JavaScript. In Vue or Svelte, recursion and logic feel bolted onto an HTML templating layer, which makes complex patterns less fluid.
> Writing UI as pure functions of state feels far more natural
That makes sense, but that's not what react does. Components are functions of their "prop"s. The rest of the state comes from a memoized cache in a fiber. Which fiber? That's determined from a reconciliation algorithm. Does it do the right thing? Usually.
You can tell if it's "a function of state" by whether the state is in the parameter list.
