It's not vaguely adjacent, the actual foundations of that research were directly publicly funded and wouldn't be possible without it - the author is not talking about how their PageRank algorithm got funded nor money that Google received.
“They are so racialised. They should never even let those be published because it’s like the worst stereotypes about Africa, or India, or you name it,” said Alenichev.
This is a problem and always has been with AI, people have been saying this for at least a decade at this point. Type in "photorealistic picture of child in refugee camp" in any AI that lets you.
None of this refutes that fact that it was created and pushed by Meta nor explains why it remains popular when there are "better" alternatives by nearly any objective measurement. HTML template frameworks have gotten significantly better since your thesis over ten years ago, Vue.js being the primary one that quickly followed React less than a year after it came out. I also used backbone and knockout.js professionally and, while I agree I definitely prefer React over those, it doesn't explain why React remains popular.
I like to argue about it because I like knowing why people think the way they do about React. I'm a long-time React hater and still look for ways to change my mind, so there's a point for me I guess?
Hard disagree. React is only popular because large companies made it so. There are few things that React is inherently better than Vue and none of them are its bundle footprint, page load speeds, nor the average time to learn one or the other.
Subjectively I am extremely in opposition to the fact that XML anything with composable functions is more intuitive than HTML templates by any stretch of the imagination.