I disagree that JS frameworks are in any way a problem. React is not substantially different from developing a Rails frontend using um... what do the kids use these days? HAML? Hamlet! No, that's not right. Anyway...
The real trouble comes when you think that "switching to <hot new framework>" will solve all of your problems. This is equivalent to thinking that giving your troops Scottish-made swords (when they've been using German-made swords) will somehow make them fight better.
Armed with this disinformation, teams march blindly into the meat grinder of reality. "We need to do auth... again? Didn't we just do that in Django? And then Angular? Arghhhh". If your auth implementation in django was bad, and you rewrote it in angular and introduced problems, rewriting it in react is not going to magically make your developers do it right this time.
React is not substantially different from developing a Rails frontend
I think you misinterpreted the article. The developer experience isn’t what’s at stake here, it’s what the user experiences. And for 95% of systems (99%?) as simple Rails app will be faster than a React app.
User experience is affected directly by developer experience. If it's tedious, or complex, or error-prone, to develop using a framework, then the user experience will likely suffer.
The real trouble comes when you think that "switching to <hot new framework>" will solve all of your problems. This is equivalent to thinking that giving your troops Scottish-made swords (when they've been using German-made swords) will somehow make them fight better.
Armed with this disinformation, teams march blindly into the meat grinder of reality. "We need to do auth... again? Didn't we just do that in Django? And then Angular? Arghhhh". If your auth implementation in django was bad, and you rewrote it in angular and introduced problems, rewriting it in react is not going to magically make your developers do it right this time.