When people hear React, they think of a focused library used for efficiently rendering user interfaces. When people hear framework, they think of a large system that might have a few useful tools within it but is otherwise a bloated mess. They're correct about frameworks for the most part, but saying that React isn't a framework is a little misleading.
If you take React out of the box and try to do any meaningful development with it, you'll promptly hit a wall. This is because instead of being distributed as a monolithic framework, React is better described as a core library surrounded by an ecosystem of tools.
The advantage of a framework is that you can install the core library along with ...