I'm not convinced from the article that HTML-first was the thing that fixed the problem. What fixed the problem was 1) the person building it knew what they were doing and 2) it had design constraints from the get-go to be user-friendly. You can do that with React. It's arguable whether it's easier or better, but you can get there regardless of the approach you use.
1. Presumably the team that made the previous app also thought they knew what they were doing. Presumably they were not hired on the assumption that they couldn't make a good app.
2. The design constraints had always existed, the previous app just failed to meet them.