It doesn't. It's just a meme. React has been around for eleven years now, and complaints about frontend churn started with the Angular 2 announcement (in late 2015)
Churn complaints are older than Angular 2. We'd gone through an entire cycle of churn around templating engines (mustache, handlebars, ejs, jade/pug, nunchucks, underscore, lodash).
Gen 1 wars (up through 2010-ish), we had: jQuery-UI, Prototype, SproutCore, YUI, MooTools, Google Web Toolkit, Dojo, ExtJS, BackboneJS, etc. There were no survivors.
Gen 2 wars (up through 2015-ish): Angular, KnockoutJS, Ember, Enyo, React, Vue, Meteor, Polymer, Aurelia, Elm, Mithril, etc.
Gen 3 wars (up through today): React, pReact, Vue, Angular 2, Svelte, SolidJS, AlpineJS, InfernoJS, Lit, etc.
We're actually more stable than we have been in a long time. The difference in performance changing frameworks could often get 10x or sometimes even closer to 100x performance increase. Today, even the slowest framework is generally within 20-30% of hyper-optimized VanillaJS. You really can't go wrong with any of them anymore.
Gen 1 wasn't Gen1. Gen1 for dynamic websites was a lamp stack with yolo javascript in the php header. Then people really started using jQuery because targeting a bunch of browsers at the time was a huge incompatible mess, along with other tools like modernize.js . Then your gen 1 started in earnest, if I remember correctly.
I remember the divisions slightly differently . There seemed to be a core movement from Ember.js and backbone onto Angular. Then from angular to react. Now I am seeing some movement off of react onto alternatives like Vue and Svelte, but almost everyone still is using react. Most shops have issues with the React part of their stack. It's still hard to get buy in for the alternatives in production. No one is using web assembly or even knows what a web component is.
I disagree about the comment about not going wrong with either. This assumes you or your team have the time to maintain the stack with the large amount of dependencies, as there are security patches often and deprecations often. It's a waste when it seems like a large portion of the actual market is just creating dashboard products. You can handle this with a much lighter frontend if you can get buy in (you can't).
