I like that vue manages dependencies so you dont worry about pure components anymore, but I believe that was fixed recently in react? The biggest thing is I despise writing JSX. To me it just feels absolutely miserable. The upside is that you have incredible fine grained control over the dynamic rendering of components, but so far even in my complex app there's been no need to write a render function yet (similar equivalent in vue to get that same level of control as react).
Also, I really like the data binding which vue took from angular. That was always by far my favorite part of angular, rather than having the binding be written in JS which feels too mechanic to me. I dont feel like I'm writing HTML / front end code, I feel like I'm writing a hybrid mecha mutant of JS + HTML + weird syntax.
For me and my team, it hits the right balance between Angular's structure and React's no-structure. We can use it for small apps within a server-rendered website, or larger SPAs.
I can hand a project to a junior dev and not have to explain project structure or patterns, nor worry about things going off the rails. Generally, after getting a feature working, most of the feedback I'll need to give is "break this 300 line file up into 3-4 smaller ones". Great ESLint rules provided by the Vue team really help with this.
With Vue 3, with the two APIs, I know that I'll be able to hand a feature off to a developer of any level and know they can accomplish it however it makes the most sense.
I can also jump into a legacy Vue app built by another team and have no issues getting oriented. In my experience with React, I haven't seen the same router configuration twice. Most React projects I've inherited feel over engineered
On a more meta level, I think the single-file API its a much better mental model than React's. Your HTML is still just HTML, and your styles are CSS or Sass, or whatever you choose.It's why I preferred AngularJS over the others at the time.
The short version: state in a react app is all over the place and not as easy to reason about as its advertising claims in addition to buggy libs all over the ecosystem, vue has actually achieved sanity by focusing on developer usefulness and how applications change over time.
