> React was just one of many then, and the rest all crumbled.
Luck played a role, but if you were well versed in the ecosystem at the time (read: worked professionally in more than one framework), the others all had well known trajectories, limitations, or issues. Angular was just fine; Knockout was eaten by Angular. Ember was way too rigid and magical. jQuery was great but not a framework, more like a lodash. Backbone was really cool but incomplete and didn't help enough. In a way its the best one to compare too, because React was also minimal, but not incomplete - instead the part it did, it did better than you would on your own, then let you do whatever you want with everything else - I think they marked as "The V in MVC" at the time. It was both really powerful, simple, and easy to pick up especially if you were using a lot of jQuery or vanilla js at the time. Its the only one since jQuery that felt like it was simply adding useful stuff, and not taking anything away; I wasn't at all surprised to see it stick as well as jQuery, and for the others to fade. You'd be lucky to outright choose it out of ignorance.
Luck played a role, but if you were well versed in the ecosystem at the time (read: worked professionally in more than one framework), the others all had well known trajectories, limitations, or issues. Angular was just fine; Knockout was eaten by Angular. Ember was way too rigid and magical. jQuery was great but not a framework, more like a lodash. Backbone was really cool but incomplete and didn't help enough. In a way its the best one to compare too, because React was also minimal, but not incomplete - instead the part it did, it did better than you would on your own, then let you do whatever you want with everything else - I think they marked as "The V in MVC" at the time. It was both really powerful, simple, and easy to pick up especially if you were using a lot of jQuery or vanilla js at the time. Its the only one since jQuery that felt like it was simply adding useful stuff, and not taking anything away; I wasn't at all surprised to see it stick as well as jQuery, and for the others to fade. You'd be lucky to outright choose it out of ignorance.