After reading a bunch of stuff as result of this, I think you are the most correct. Difference in performance on different frameworks seems to be more like philosophical rather than practical.

It is enough that your website has just a couple of images, comparison of the "shipping size" of the runtime bundling becomes rather meaningless. It is the same for initial latency for showing the rendered content.

These frameworks were designed for heavy sites, and their "base speed" becomes irrelevant. If you understand how do they work and use them correctly, there shouldn't be that much difference. Assuming, that we use JavaScript on client-side in the end.

How many well-written code bases have you seen?

React is a PITA to learn, and even the easiest frameworks encounter devs who jump right in and commit shot code to deliver "value" right away, only for that code to live on forever haunting the devs left with mess after the founder coders move on.