React itself with nothing else is plenty fast. You would have to go way out of your way to see performance differences between different UI approaches, computers are just way too fast to notice whether this click resulting in the div's text changing to +1 is slow or fast, even if the implementation were crazy convoluted.
What makes react apps slow is using it badly, and having 10 other libraries getting in the picture loading fat UI elements, etc.
And frankly these would be much slower in your render everything anew approach.
> But for several years we've been able to style radio buttons however we want using a few CSS tools
proves how good the current state is, where a dev can think things will just be ok, for everyone, if you just ripped all that complexity and ship it (which should be the attitude for a good framework).
A great example of all-world-is-a-nail stance mixed with extreme hubris.
Perhaps those same people would have a slow complex mess in vanilla tools too though, so maybe React is a scapegoat like PHP was, and Javascript was.