This misses the point completely for repeated arguments that make no sense "Its historical ...".

The reality is, you lose programmatic control when you use HTML directly. Its much easier to have Dialog component that reacts to its state, than to use the native dialog tag.

Friends don't let friends use npm

Same reason they don't use any platform. It's not as good as you think.

This article misses the most crucial point.

Developers don't "use the platform" because all the building blocks for any component you can think of are already there. When "the platform" adds yet another set of not particularly pretty and badly configurable components, why would we use them? When there's tons of mature, deeply thought out, battle tested, cleanly abstracted components out there - especially when _those_ components are made of divs and layouting and CSS and are therefore malleable to the pixel instead of being made of magic browser pixie dust?

The Platform doesn't provide much tooling to aid development, it remains in isolation

The platform sucks, still does, it's very simple. If you used native elements for everything, the users would complain that your website sucks ass.

Because the platform is too hard. The average person does not want to spend time figuring out how to get stuff to work. All the browser documentation is 1000 times nerdier than the average person wants. They want all this low level stuff abstracted away from them.

Even if you want to do it the nerdy way and bust out a text editor and start writing some HTML tags it all looks ugly out of the box. Browsers pushed everything for making websites onto 3rd party devs, so they shouldn't be surprised when they want to use 3rd party dev's stuff over the bad and confusing 1st party ones. The browser developers are in an ivory tower building a product that doesn't really care about web developers and their needs.

Seems from the article that this is more "why don't more REACT developers use the platform"?

I think it is largely because IMHO React is very much an "overlay" on top of (and inspite of) normal web standards and general beat practice (e.g. JSX throwing out decades of separation of concerns etc), leading to whole swathes of people who have basically only ever been "react developers" not generalist frontend engineers. They find the DOM APIs "icky" because it takes them out of the React lifecycle, mindset, and ecosystem etc.

Tldr, React and NPM are a pox on the world of frontend development and especially the JavaScript ecosystem. It's given JavaScript such a bad name, unfairly.

Still with AI basically nothing matters any more - no one sees the code any more.

JavaScript is an obvious skills gap.

Most people claim to be able to write JavaScript but what they really mean is that they can write only a few lines only if someone else provides them a template and if someone has made all the design decisions for them. It’s color by number. Then you can’t point any of this out because people become immediately defensive crying about how hard life is and how impossible writing original software is and on and on.

I got tired of working with all the liars and pretenders. The greatest challenge doing that work is the people, not the technology.