I don't know if you recall the circumstances when React was initially revealed, and maybe I recall it wrongly. The way I remember it was that there were a bunch of frameworks (Ember, AngularJS, Sencha, was it?) and they were all kinda slow. And then React promised it would improve on them (not be an "alternative to vanilla"). I don't think they ever explicitly compared it to vanilla (as a competitor) as the basic premise was "durrr, vanilla hard, React easy.

That is true, and that is what I am trying to point out is that it looks like community driving to blind evangelism and counterpart React to VanillaJS. I think it is largely a community problem but it would be less of a problem if React try to stay aligned with VanilaJS. For example, they said that React rendering is kinda slow and they wanna bring a new async model from React Native and bring it to ReactJS. Wouldn't be better if instead of fighting with DOM they make it friendlier to VanillaJS and DOM so if you need low-level performance optimizations they could add React primitives instead of an isolate from it and actually push React Native to the web. I would rather use Flutter if I will not be able to interop with DOM and rich browser features

By "tunnel vision" I mean the part where you imply that if you don't see your proposed list of React's advantages as advantages, then you are underqualified to even be making decisions about that. In reality, the most qualified front-end developers tend to say frameworks are not needed at all, and those supposed advantages along with them by extension. And this makes perfect sense because back in the days when these "old people" started doing web development, React did not even exist.

I am trying to say that you might have to use React even if you personally do not want it because if technology is so deep into the industry so it becomes unavoidable in many cases. And if people turn themselves into a React-dependent community, React should stay simple and not try to separate from foundational stuff.

I bet that if every new developer ignored React for the initial couple of years, people would soon stop using React in entirety, as its value is greatly diminished (if not completely negated) when your fundamental skills (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) are good enough to write more involved applications. (And please, PLEASE, don't event try to imply that anyone who can do React automatically knows HTML, CSS and JavaScript, cause that couldn't be further from the truth.)

I guess you missed my sarcasm. Let me quote myself 😀:

A huge pool of “React experts” while knowing nothing about DOM.

or

React should stay a library that is as simple as possible to use otherwise if you need to build a solid knowledge to use it, you better build that knowledge around foundational WEB concepts like VanillaJS, DOM, etc but not some framework even the most popular one. You do not wanna end up becoming a person who would reply RoR or Node to the question “Which programming language do you know?”