Is this something you have actually experienced? Can you cite an example of running into this issue? I've built fairly complex UIs with React (tables with nested dropdowns, financial statements with a lot of data points, dynamic charts / graphs, elements with animations, etc. and haven't run into this issue.
The only time I've seen people have trouble w/ performance is when they use something like Redux or Apollo on top of React. The problem in those cases of course is Redux or Apollo, not React itself.