For your run of the mill website, this probably doesn’t matter. But for interactive web content, it can absolutely be a competitive advantage to use something faster and more responsive.
What makes React so slow these days?
https://emnudge.dev/blog/react-hostage
It's so easy, that we monkey patch react to debug it https://github.com/welldone-software/why-did-you-render
Plus the vdom... Isn't great, the bundle size puts react at an inherit disadvantage, and the community has a knack for over reliance on bloated packages
There are ways of writing React that result in vast numbers of re-renders... it's not a best practice, but it's relatively easy to make happen, especially if you ignore the official recommendations and pull Stackoverflow answers from 2015.
React is easy to be quickly productive in... thus, it has footguns.
You saw the same thing in the before times with Adobe Flex. So much code from people who had no understanding of the lifecycle - apps that worked but were appallingly slow and buggy.
That would be incredibly rare. Despite the myth propagated, React is unlikely to be faster unless you were doing a ton of interleaved layout-triggering reads and writes. Even naive direct dom-diffing approaches like hyperapp/choo/morphdom can be faster.
Yes, if the company like reddit, facebook - which has prestige, finances and ability to hire rockstar-10x-A-players React/JS developers is unable to get their shit right and their react fronts works like garbage then it simply means that there is no hope, for some reason it's simply not possible to make performant app with React.
Like, I can feel the delay typing in a web browser compared to native, and it drives me crazy. If the output doesn't seem like a direct response to my input, I lose focus. Simple as that, and react seems to be a big part of that problem.
We have ways to go in our apps, but solid has done wonders already. Currently I'm researching state caching and optimistic updates, both of which should also improve it.
Fast enough is a myth. Instant apps are magic.
Especially not React itself. And even if React itself or the way it does things is "too slow" (which is the only metric that counts) then there are escape hatches or ways to deal with that.
