Modern Vaadin-Like Technologies

So I was trying to bring up a project using Vaadin and ran into some trouble. Namely that compared to a reactjs frontend or something it’s kind of…bad. However, it’s tight coupling to spring is pretty desirable. Is there something similar that’s a bit more…up to date?

I feel like Vaadin is just extremely restrictive, and all the cool features are hidden behind the premium version.

Should I simply bite the bullet and learn reactjs a bit better for the frontend?

This is a technology discussion not a help post.

To help me understand what are you looking for in a framework, could you tell me what are the bad things you found in Vaadin? Also what features you found cool, but were only available in the paid subscription?

If you feel like Spring is desirable, how about Spring MVC?