Is it true that it is React’s fault? Is there any other replacement for heavy user interaction, that is clearly more performative? You cannot do that on server side.
Whatever is at fault, their code viewer now sucks. I often cannot even use basic text functionality like double click + drag to highlight/select whole words. It has become broken software at some point.
For the code search one annoyance that they introduced was, that one needs to be logged in to search a project. Another annoyance is how the search works. Why, oh why, do soooo many programs/websites/software things have issues searching for a simple 100% substring match? There should always be an option in a search for most software, to search for exact substring without involving any magic. Then the checkbox to optionally ignore case. Only when this basic search functionality is ensured, should they care about developing anything else.
Just selecting text in the code viewer is so broken it drives me nuts everytime. Thankfully you can just press "." to open VS Code Web with the current file open.
In my experience performance issues in React also creep in without it being obvious when developing, especially across a larger team. It tends to be more obvious with server-side frameworks like django or rails.
After reading a bunch of stuff as result of this, I think you are the most correct. Difference in performance on different frameworks seems to be more like philosophical rather than practical.
It is enough that your website has just a couple of images, comparison of the "shipping size" of the runtime bundling becomes rather meaningless. It is the same for initial latency for showing the rendered content.
These frameworks were designed for heavy sites, and their "base speed" becomes irrelevant. If you understand how do they work and use them correctly, there shouldn't be that much difference. Assuming, that we use JavaScript on client-side in the end.
React is a PITA to learn, and even the easiest frameworks encounter devs who jump right in and commit shot code to deliver "value" right away, only for that code to live on forever haunting the devs left with mess after the founder coders move on.
