If you could go back in time, would you still pick React?

No. I think one of the issues of react is that even though is not a framework (do they still say that?) it is used as one. IMHO Vue 2 was a very good framework in as much as it hid away from the the miscellaneous and complexities of the browser and allowed you to focus on your app.

React doesn’t really try to do that and forces ones to work at one level lower of abstraction where I need to constantly be aware of JS single-threadedness, worry about state and propagation among a bunch of other things that have very little to do with the specific problem I’m trying to solve.

I’d pick Svelte or Vue, or even better, server-side rendering with some light js (i.e. alpine.js) sprinkled over

Yes, yes, yes! I wish the rest of our ASP.NET Razor stuff was in React so that everything would be traceable. Right now our code base is split between React and Razor with JS(/Jquery) all over the place. This results in files containing thousands of lines of code, which makes checking what logic is behind a button/form is incredibly hard. With React we have all logic for a certain component in the component itself, making it easy to figure out what is going on.

No, because I've since discovered SvelteKit.

Why would anyone not pick React?

Yes, every single time