What question? You seem to have already decided on the answer without asking anything.
What would be the monetary cost of such decision versus the monetary cost of the one taken?
Which approach would achieve the same value of 20 percent improvement in perf and engagement with lower amount of money being spent?
As someone who used to work on large Backbone apps I agree that it's a huge drain on developer productivity -- hard to add features, hard to test, lack of standards, etc. Not to mention the recruiting problem: I would never accept a job offer to work on a Backbone app again.