I disagree that its frameworks all the way down. There is a distinction between frameworks and libraries. React, Angular, et al are frameworks in the truest sense of the word.
Things like jQuery and Underscore on down to stdio.h are libraries. You can pick and choose from what they contain but they're not so tightly coupled that they get in your way.
They're a tool belt with tools that do one thing and do it really well. Frameworks are like having a tool belt with a hammer that also has a saw on the end but in order to use the saw you have to grab the screwdriver even if you're not actually using it.
I would argue that React is closer to a library than a framework. It's a small library with some useful functions for making web components. It helps by removing a bunch of boilerplate code that you would have to re-write with each new app. The thing that it doesn't do is hold you hand and tell you exactly the way things should be done as some of the other frameworks do.
React is a library, plain and simple. It has literally no opinions on even basic stuff like routing, or how to manage application data.
It takes your data as an input and by some mechanism lays out a visual representation of it defined by your components render methods, being sure to update the visual representation as the data changes. The rest are implementation details.
Things like jQuery and Underscore on down to stdio.h are libraries. You can pick and choose from what they contain but they're not so tightly coupled that they get in your way.
They're a tool belt with tools that do one thing and do it really well. Frameworks are like having a tool belt with a hammer that also has a saw on the end but in order to use the saw you have to grab the screwdriver even if you're not actually using it.