For years, I dodged React like the plague. In fact, I avoided JavaScript altogether, even in web-related tasks. Take static site generators, for example. For my old chemistry blog, I experimented with a variety of tools, year by year: Pelican, Jekyll, Hugo, Grav... In the end, I settled on Zola. Fast, robust, no JS needed, perfect for CI/CD workflows. Just prerendered HTML and sprinkle scripts for flair (e.g. comments, a masonry in the home page ecc.).