It's faster on my 2018 well-above-base-config Macbook, too. Somewhere along the way the original promise of this whole AJAX thing—faster updates, no page loads—got lost. The page loads are usually faster for real sites in the wild, where we have two versions to compare.

I use it everywhere now. It loads instantly, it's amazing. The only thing I miss is the auto categorization, I have to filter out all the newsletters with my brain now.

I'm tempted to make the switch myself, is there a way to permanently force this? Otherwise I'm just going to use Gmail from Thunderbird, which can be a Behemoth but it's not as damn slow as that UI at the end of the day.

Not intending to defend react, but you are neglecting other possibilities such as that they have not tried, tried too little or that it's not important to their business and others targeting different userbases could succeed.

Without a definition for "high performance" the statement doesn't really say much. If we had a definition for it, we'd also have to ask if "high performance" was even a goal for the reddit team. As you stated, reddit is the most popular forum on the internet and it has continued to grow even with the new design so perhaps the performance concerns were considered premature. I know some would disagree based on their own issues with performance, but it's at least safe to say that most people using reddit don't seem to have a problem with it (if there is one thing redditers love its to complain loudly about why reddit is going to shit)

Yes, your sample size is one.

Netlify is also built with React and its homepage loads amazingly fast (<1MB in size).