The article seems to make the bloat self-evident by comparing the load times of identical apps and finding React magnitudes slower.
To be fair, I haven't written in React for a few years now. I reached for Svelte with the last two apps I built after using React professionally for 4 years. I was expecting there to be a learning curve and there just... wasn't? It was staggering how little I had to think about. Even something as small as not having to write in JSX (however normalized I was to writing in it) really felt meaningful once I took a step back and saw the forest for the trees.
I dunno. I just remember being on the interview circuit and asking engineers to tell me about useCallback, useEffect, useMemo, and memo and how they're used, how something like console.log would fair in relation to them, when to include/exclude arguments from memoization arrays, etc.. and it was pretty easy to trip a lot of people up. I think the introduction of the compiler is an attempt to mitigate a lot of those pains, but newer frameworks designed with those headaches in mind from the start rather than mitigating much later and you can feel it.