I couldn't disagree more. I work on a very small team, and our current projects use big modern JS frameworks. Our productivity has never been higher. I absolutely hate having to touch old projects, that I had to build from much lower level APIs.
Your "very small team" of under 5 developers is still what React, et al. target.
Developers leave about every two years. Engineering management want to use technologies that allow for resource flexibility, and those libraries are designed to attract both parties. You, and management, for different reasons.
