It won by marketing and the angularjs to Angular breaking change. If they kept going with angularjs or had an upgrade path react wouldn't be default in the enterprise stack. That's all on Google.
Meteor was node framework. jQuery is probably still more popular but it is only a lib. Vue had a Chinese language problem.
React won because a framework by Facebook felt safe.
Google's incapable of sticking to anything good. Nobody gets promoted at Google maintaining a system. So somebody inevitably gets the idea to make a 2.0 which isn't backwards compatible, enabling them to do all sorts of bold promotion-worthy innovation. And inevitably 2.0 isn't very good. Even worse, it makes the entire ecosystem confusing and unhealthy.
Products rarely win because of technical merits. Products win with marketing. Technical merits can add another layer to the marketing but without facebook's brand people would still be on angular.
It's unclear to me that Facebook's 'brand' is superior to Google. Google has plenty of popular, successful open source projects. If Facebook's brand was all that was needed for it to crush Google, wouldn't Pytorch be crushing Tensorflow right now?
We are talking about a different time and different market. Google had the top brand overall back then but just in terms of frontend frameworks their brand became mud and no one trusted them after they spent the last year or two moving into angularjs and now they needed to rewrite everything. So they rewrote what they had in React instead of AngularJS. Facebook had the more trusted brand over Google and other frameworks.
Meteor was node framework. jQuery is probably still more popular but it is only a lib. Vue had a Chinese language problem.
React won because a framework by Facebook felt safe.