> People choose React because you could have gone from 0.15 to 18.0 with maybe a week of effort, often less.

That's only if you are not using other libraries, otherwise it will take much more time than that and the upgrade would very likely require you to rewrite your components as functions which will be a massive undertaking, specially for larger codebases which already made extensive use of OOP patterns to keep code modular. It's even worse if you consider that React is unusable for most projects without a lot of associated tooling that also faces breaking changes often (i.e. your build tooling, your CD/CI environment and deploy workflow, etc.).

In reality React is anything but stable, it has in 10 years faced multiple paradigm shifts in terms of development experience, had most of its codebase changed or refactored multiple times, etc.

   > Nobody has gotten fired for choosing React.

This is an (unfortunately) very true piece of wisdom which I have to agree with.