The most interesting thing to me is that React's virtual dom implementation, according to http://vdom-benchmark.github.io/vdom-benchmark/, is generally the slowest of the bunch. You could pretty much move to using anything else and have a faster vdom implementation and smaller library. Additionally, many out there are so similar to writing React that I don't see how using React is a win over the alternatives. In my own experience on my machine, the dbmon example in this article for Angular is significantly outperformed by the likes of cito+t7, http://t7js.com/dbmonster/precompiled.html. Angular shows roughly 6fps topping out at 6.7 for me, while t7 is showing roughly 13fps topping out at 13.8. I don't know about anyone else, but 100% more performance isn't trivial.