no. has to have 20 years of understanding algorithms and breaking up a solution into its sum to explain it. React or other current fad has nothing to do with it, nor will come in interviews at beginning. You live or die by your whiteboard skills.
And who decides if you have 20 years worth of understanding of algos? A developer with 5 years worth of experience? What less experienced people don't understand is that development is not necessarily a one way path like at FAANGs where you move from level 1 to 2 to 3 to lead to manager to director within 10 years or you're worthless.
For most of the developers, it's not a video game where you just level up. It involves working on projects small and large. A lot of time doing business analysis or some part of project management or documentation or various other things. Many of us work at small or medium sized businesses that don't have problems of scale, but rather problems of complexity.
Also maybe react or some other fad like Kafka or microservices won't come at the beginning, but at a later stage of interviews, even for a junior position, if you have 10+ years experience, I bet you'll be expected to know those things, otherwise "what have you been doing for 10 years?" Solving actual business problems and not inventing things to do so I can put them on my resume, thanks.
If a quantum physics specialist comes to you and starts explaining what it is and you understand, even if you have zero years of experience in it, I'd say he passed the interview. Same applies for this as well.
