React by default is fairly fast but what makes it stand out is that it gives the tools to make the bottlenecks faster without having to drop the nice abstraction.
Popp's fiddles don't use shouldComponentUpdate, as far as I can tell. They replace using props (application state) by components-local state and an animation prop. I'm not entirely certain that his semantics map to the original ones (in terms of expectations).
My bad :x JSFiddle is unusable on mobile and I assumed it was using shouldComponentUpdate. Anyway, the conclusion still holds, you can refactor your code to be performant while keeping in the React paradigm.
You have a lot less control over the performance of your app with data binding.
