performance was the least attractive reason for adopting React. React introduced composition as the default way of thinking about UIs to the web. You created components and used them to build more complex components. Data was immutable and flowed in one direction (parent component -> child component).
Comparing the above to ng with its dependency injection, MVC style approach to UIs, that used HTML based annotations and tags to sprinkle in functionality (`ng-if` baby) -- it was a much more simple way to build web applications.
React's style of building UIs has largely won. Vue, etc. all follow this component with composition view of the world.
> React sucked for years, with a terrible doc, a crippling webpack experience and breaking compact all the time.
Webpack has nothing to do with React. React has always had good documentation. The reason the documentation was good in the beginning was because the API surface area was tiny compared to Backbone, Ember, ng, etc..
I'm not going to go point by point here. You sound like you have a very superficial understanding of the space.
I'm going to hard pass on clicking a marketing link to your blog.