This surprises me a lot. I spin up new react apps with vite often to replicate issues with 3rd party libs we use. Like how do they not know you can just spin something up over on CodePen or CodeSandbox and there's not a hint of a server side paradigm required? (sure, vite has a little server but you don't really need to know anything about it)
Some devs have worked exclusively in feature mills where expectations are rock bottom and some senior setups the project for them. When recruiters don't filter them, a basic React test has to.