It’s really good at highly dynamic/interactive apps, such as browser versions of asana or slack, or other things where user actions are small but frequent. If you aren’t doing full page reloads and have a lot of changes, it’s much simpler than managing each individual state change in vanilla javascript.

I personally think React’s component model is much nicer than any templating system I’ve used as it supports composition as a first-class feature.

And if done well, yes you get better performance on the frontend. (If done poorly, you don’t.)