Exact same experience here. I've been banging this drum for years. When hooks came around I thought they might make it better, but alas, we are still in a downwards spiral. Building web apps is 10x more complicated today than it was ten years ago, with nothing to show for it.
I'm happy to see some known voices in the community realizing this, but also sad that this is how things work now. The rise and fall of React will have been both a product of social media / developer celebrities.
You can’t have an easy solution when you have tons of interaction and state.
My comparison is always with Svelte / Vue, and also what we had in previous eras (Backbone, Knockout, etc). HTMx is picking up steam too. We used to push out interactive UI in days/weeks, and mind you, in the past websites did not look all the same. There were no component libraries to start from. Today it seems most React projects are planned in months/quarters despite being built atop a mountain of third-party code, all meant to 'speed things up'.
What we do today is not faster at all, too much time is wasted on tooling and issues that arise from React's architecture (hooks, ssr, data loading, error handling, async issues, black-box performance issues, dependency hell).
It's been neither of those things and I'm actually beginning to regret making that choice.
Desktop software was never this fragile.
React, however just clicked. f(state) = UI just makes sense
Throw in SSR and component memoization and you really have no idea what caused a UI change to occur.
I feel like "X new library/framework's code is a mess" is the new "People don't want to work anymore" trope (that older workers have been saying for over 100 years).
If Facebook.com cannot get it right, who actually can?
"No True Scotsman" is also a trope going on for > 100 years, yet you are appealing to it.
This could be said of any team using any technology. If the team is better at using it, and they are provided more time to use it properly, then they'll make a better product. That's not unique to React.
React sucks because its scope creep makes it difficult to maintain, and there's a pretty low ceiling for the end user's experience. Yes, better teams can make better products with React than worse teams, but that doesn't mean that either end product is any good.
I've worked on 4 large react code bases and they always devolve into these blobs of non-deterministic async state with unpredictable performance.
I actually like JSX and the component model so I just use solid-js which is everything I like about react but with effortless performance and you can actually get away with never using effects so your code can actually be deterministic.