I prefer Eric Eliot’s take on this argument. Yes, the ecosystem is a bit vomit pie at the moment. But React is like jQuery in 2006. jQuery solved the fractured DOM problem. It was great. It has lasted. It’s still around.

I think React solves one problem too (although people may argue with this): It’s a declarative framework.

You make some good points and I think it’s important for us to think about these problems you present. But I disagree that React is a flash in a pan. I think it’s a bit bigger then that (IMHO).

With regards to babel, it’s just implementing draft specifications, no harm in that. If the browsers were quicker to implement, we wouldn’t have this mess of of tooling. So it’s not the open source projects that are to blame…