[prawks]

2 quick points:

- The paradigm shift in writing interactive web pages in the React "write your app like a game that re-renders every frame"-style is extremely compelling. You are correct that there are plenty of largely static sites that do not need JS-based rendering, but for people wanting to develop single-page web apps or other interactive content, that mindset is a godsend.

- We recently re-wrote an ecommerce site with React and it is WCAG 2.0 AA compliant. To our knowledge, and to the independent firms that have audited our application, screenreaders have no problem with it. You still have to go through the diligence of all of the standard a11y-friendly techniques like semantic markup and thoughtful keyboard navigation, but React at least does not get in the way.

[straws]

Another compelling use-case of React is the ability to use it as a better templating language ― treating HTML as a data structure instead of a string, better composability of the units of your UI, and the ease of rendering to a string.

It's an interesting question whether the tendency to overcomplicate a largely static site by implementing it as a single-page app should be attributed to the average developer or to the creators of the library though.

[SadWebDeveloper]

Screenreaders do work, but document navigation gets crippled above and beyond, SPA's tend to alienate visually impaired people.