Seems from the article that this is more "why don't more REACT developers use the platform"?

I think it is largely because IMHO React is very much an "overlay" on top of (and inspite of) normal web standards and general beat practice (e.g. JSX throwing out decades of separation of concerns etc), leading to whole swathes of people who have basically only ever been "react developers" not generalist frontend engineers. They find the DOM APIs "icky" because it takes them out of the React lifecycle, mindset, and ecosystem etc.

Tldr, React and NPM are a pox on the world of frontend development and especially the JavaScript ecosystem. It's given JavaScript such a bad name, unfairly.

Still with AI basically nothing matters any more - no one sees the code any more.