Well, you can argue that tech meetups in general are a form of marketing - but this wasn't really a 'company X hosts a react meetup trying to find people to work there' type of thing. Many drove for hours just to attend.
Getting dozens of people in the same room, excited about technology is not trivial, and having hundreds of people show up is relatively hard in a city like Vienna which doesn't have a vibrant tech scene. Sure, some people come to find job opportunities or for free food, but many 'established' meetups sometimes just have a few attendees, so this on its own is not a small task. Peter definitely didn't have time to focus on this given everything else that was going on. So for Vienna, this is pretty much as viral as it gets.
Not sure about other cities where this took place.