Has this author been on the other side of the fence? I have encountered, for every bloated javascript problem child, an equally burdensome python monolith, or sprawling maze of go microservices. I suspect the root cause is something to do with human error, but I digress.
The benefit of much-derided React code when I can onboard new developers from 3 different countries and backgrounds and have them all writing DRY, tested, idiomatic code within a few days. They can then ship a feature that then provides more values to the end user, who probably doesn't care a fig what HTML is. Or, like a patient senior developer, they understand that shipping is preferable to not shipping, and that perfect performance, accessibility, and usability are all asymptotic to us mere mortals.
We are replacing truly the most disgusting codebase I've ever seen right now, a WP instance (alright) highly customized (worrisome) written by pre-for-loop contractors (uh-oh) which has over 10k lines of jQuery (uh-oh) for a relatively small site, but all of the jQuery lives in one main.js (UH-OH) and executes on every page whether or not it does anything to that page. It's also written in such a way that it crawls the DOM so many times on huge HTML payloads that the entire page slows to a crawl as your computer fan winds up. You'll often get 10 seconds of non-responsive page after the first paint. There's barely any interactivity here as well, just a couple of modals and buttons.
As the client scaled up, they started having serious performance problems that rendered the site completely unusable for some users, and some pages were so bad on the backend that simply visiting a page could cause an outage. Refactorings were considered (minor ones attempted), but the code is so poorly written and brittle that it's actually easier to just fucking rewrite it, so they/we just do targeted performance enhancements, bugfixes, and minor updates while rewriting.
All that to say, the worst codebases I've ever seen are PHP monoliths, (though I've seen some rough Django/flask as well) shitted out by contracting firms which bill high rates for code written by juniors. People (particularly those who frequent this site) are way too focused on the choice of framework when trying to assess these outcomes.
The benefit of much-derided React code when I can onboard new developers from 3 different countries and backgrounds and have them all writing DRY, tested, idiomatic code within a few days. They can then ship a feature that then provides more values to the end user, who probably doesn't care a fig what HTML is. Or, like a patient senior developer, they understand that shipping is preferable to not shipping, and that perfect performance, accessibility, and usability are all asymptotic to us mere mortals.