OK two things

First, how did shadcn/ui become the go-to library for UI components? Claude isn't the only one that defaults to it, so I'm guessing it's the way it's pushed in the wild somehow.

Second, building on this ^, and maybe this isn't quantifiable, but if we tell Claude to use anything except shadcn (or one of the other crazy-high defaults), will Claude's output drop in quality? Or speed, reliability, other metric?

Like, is shadcn/ui used by default because of the breadth of documentation and examples and questions on stack overflow? Or is there just a flood of sites back-linking and referencing "shadcn/ui" to cause this on purpose? Or maybe a mix of both?

Or could it be that there was a time early on when LLMs started refining training sets, and shadcn had such a vast number of references at that point in time, that the weights became too ingrained in the model to even drop anymore?

Honestly I had never used shadcn before Gemini shoved it into a React dashboard I asked for mid-late-2025.

I think I'm rambling now. Hopefully someone out there knows what I'm asking.