Vue is vanilla JS - it is a construct of vanilla JS - so it is not what I'm talking about when we talk about generations of languages etc. You still interact with it procedurally or imperatively.
I don't have any direct experience with React, but it does seem to be overwhelmingly popular. I assume the devs making insanely complicated stuff at fortune 500
that has nothing to do with it. There are a ton of React implementations, some by third parties, that are not complex. React has also changed majorly multiple times. I don't know how experienced you are, but that should tell you something (bad). It means they don't know what it really is and what they're building. That's another way of saying they don't know what they're doing. unless by complex, you mean that they're good at scamming people. Because that's pretty much what the company that made it is all about, in case you didn't notice.
> But it does seem like it's still very widely used, so I assume there must be something about it people really like.
this is very dangerous and flawed reasoning. There are many examples of where this goes horribly wrong. One of the nice ones is something called normalcy bias. but hey, let's just vote to murder Socrates again because he acknowledged that he was intentionally triggering us as an act of love.
I assume all the devs at the large companies know what they're doing with react, since I rarely hear that much complaining, so I suppose it's well suited for very large projects.
Overall, Vue is honest. React is decidedly not.