While React has its value, especially for building apps, you are right that it has been overused and misused to build websites that should have rather been static (HTML, CSS) or jam stack (HTML, CSS, JS but with minimal overhead).
Developers tend to forget (or never even heard about) progressive enhancement. Not only mobile first, but accessibility and simplicity first, adding anything else as a covenience and design layer on top.
Comments mentioned the UNIX philosophy: let a tool be simple and achieve one task perfectly. This is why we have HTML, CSS, JS and server / back-end technology separated in the first place.
Another discussion in the comments states that every junior developer should start with the basics, not only HTML and CSS, but also vanilla JS. I do not totally agree to that. When I started developing websites, JavaScript was not that common, and it was quite different from current JavaScript / EcmaScript. We can write higher level, developer-friendly code, like ESnext, but also TypeScript, CoffeeScript, or anything useful, while developing, and let our build tools export code that runs on the client. Exactly like native software has been developed in C, C++ etc. for decades. No need to learn assembly to write a desktop application. Consequentially, it is not necessary to start with "vanilla JS" or even dive deep into the details and pitfalls of the "hard parts" of JavaScript to understand programming and web development.
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While React has its value, especially for building apps, you are right that it has been overused and misused to build websites that should have rather been static (HTML, CSS) or jam stack (HTML, CSS, JS but with minimal overhead).
Developers tend to forget (or never even heard about) progressive enhancement. Not only mobile first, but accessibility and simplicity first, adding anything else as a covenience and design layer on top.
Comments mentioned the UNIX philosophy: let a tool be simple and achieve one task perfectly. This is why we have HTML, CSS, JS and server / back-end technology separated in the first place.
Another discussion in the comments states that every junior developer should start with the basics, not only HTML and CSS, but also vanilla JS. I do not totally agree to that. When I started developing websites, JavaScript was not that common, and it was quite different from current JavaScript / EcmaScript. We can write higher level, developer-friendly code, like ESnext, but also TypeScript, CoffeeScript, or anything useful, while developing, and let our build tools export code that runs on the client. Exactly like native software has been developed in C, C++ etc. for decades. No need to learn assembly to write a desktop application. Consequentially, it is not necessary to start with "vanilla JS" or even dive deep into the details and pitfalls of the "hard parts" of JavaScript to understand programming and web development.