IMO, yes. There are a lot of people out there with underpowered devices or slow internet connections (including me when I’m on the subway!) and modern web dev practices that output MBs of JS for simple things are a terrible experience. Just not one experienced by the developers on super fast computers and wired internet connections.
Try browsing the web with Chrome’s network throttling and CPU throttling enabled. It can be torturous.
Just to cite it again: there’s a 3kb library available that does 90% of what a >100KB library does. That no one ever even considers it is not about “perfectionism” in my eyes, it’s industry wide laziness.
If you're using my web app (I wouldn't have used React if it wasn't an application anyway, right?), you're very likely a returning visitor. Even if your first page load after signin in is a drag because you're on the subway and for some reason 100KB take five seconds—you're probably coming back anyway, because my app warrants recurring usage (and the industry heavily optimises towards that, but that's a different story).
So on the second visit, you'll have my vendor bundle cached anyway, the app loads instantly, and you will never even remember how long the first load took.
Given that—tell me again why I should care to convince my boss we need to put considerable investment into an alternative technology with a bunch of dragons lurking about, that may or may not be abandoned in a few years and bite us later on, which might introduce compatibility issues with new libraries, which existing staff and new hires must be trained to account for?
Why would I opt for a world of potential pain, just to make your first page load under bad (thus: rare) conditions slightly better?
That 10% missing are event normalization and event bubbling (preact bubble through DOM, react follows vDOM). Choose yourself what you need, but 100% compat with 3rd party libs is why I stick with react over preact.
Try browsing the web with Chrome’s network throttling and CPU throttling enabled. It can be torturous.
Just to cite it again: there’s a 3kb library available that does 90% of what a >100KB library does. That no one ever even considers it is not about “perfectionism” in my eyes, it’s industry wide laziness.