I did spend a serious amount of commercial time developing fronted UIs in React, Angular, and the before times in vanilla JS/css. I even wrote my own UI framework in Web Components, developed my own CSS framework used by an agency churning out projects for years. You get the idea, I did the thing, commercially, for over a decade. React and Angular are absolutely more complex in practice. That's fine, if you want the features go ham. But you don't need them, and most people mis-use the power and end up with a slow complex mess.

Perhaps those same people would have a slow complex mess in vanilla tools too though, so maybe React is a scapegoat like PHP was, and Javascript was.