Vue is the only one of the most popular 3 frameworks that can easily be used on a minimal basis to sort of "spruce up" old applications by selectively adding it here and there in the templates.

Seems like they should try more marketing and community outreach toward that end.

Gradual adoption is a feature / selling point not many web development frameworks can claim.

Why can't React do the same?

Please someone correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like you can only implement React using the full "modern JS stack", i.e. Node/Webpack/...

So if you want to use it on one page, it's a hard sell to set up all that infrastructure (and document it for the team)

On some sites I've used Vue.js by simply adding a tag with vue.min.js.</p><p>On sites already using Gulp or similar, it's pretty simple to incorporate the Vue bundle and use it on one or a few pages.</p>

https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html

Having said that, React is normally used with JSX syntax, which requires a compile step.

You _can_ use it with "raw" `React.createElement()` calls, but that's generally unwieldy and almost no one does that.

However, there's a very neat library called https://github.com/developit/htm , which is an almost-JSX-compatible syntax that uses JS template literal strings, and requires no compile step.