The current enthusiasm around React seems somewhat reminiscent of jQuery about 15 years back. It was the first library to solve a problem that plagued the entire industry. It was widely adopted and considered almost a "standard", to the point where you will now find an entire graveyard of Stackoverflow questions about DOM manipulation where the answer is "just use jQuery".
My gut feeling is that the same will happen to React in the next 5 years, possibly as a result of more native support for web components and front-end state management. I was writing Visual C++ front-ends around the time jQuery first appeared. Front-end state management should not be this complicated.
I wrote jQuery in production for 5 years and then switched to React for 6 years in production at a half dozen companies. In my opinion, nothing can be improved further. I love writing React, it solves every problem you can think of and scales for large codebases.
Prior to React, we were using Backbone, Handlebars and jQuery. It was horrible. Logic was put into Handlebars templates, Backbone models created an unnecessary abstraction, we had to setup our own event handlers for every model -> view change. It just didn't work. JSX solved all these problems.
Frontend-state management with React is not complicated. There is a current trend to trash React because of its perceived complexity. Take it from an experienced React developer- it's easy and fun. Hooks are a short syntactic sugar over its lifecycle methods. Once you learn hooks, there isn't much more to learn.
I'm not sure where you are in your career now, but I recommend that you give React another chance, and avoid jumping on the bandwagon to hate on React. It's solved so many problems for me and allowed me to actually enjoy my job as a software developer.
My gut feeling is that the same will happen to React in the next 5 years, possibly as a result of more native support for web components and front-end state management. I was writing Visual C++ front-ends around the time jQuery first appeared. Front-end state management should not be this complicated.