The problems with reliance on a giant framework are many. Yes, a noticeable decay of performance is one of those.
The biggest problem I see though is lost imagination. Usability concerns seem all but completely and generally forgotten unless a given framework deliberately provides a dedicated convention for a specific usability concern.
Worse still is that many developers reliant upon a giant framework absolutely cannot imagine developing anything that is not the exact same SPA as their last SPA regardless of any usability concerns or business requirements. It’s like when you’re a hammer and everything is a nail mentality meets the most myopically crippled tunnel vision.
I used to have great disdain for large frameworks because they result in degraded application performance with limited capabilities and substantial bloat. Now I primarily loathe them because they are the primary excuse for weak under developed talent to self qualify progression as a lack of career maturity under the perfection of inept disdain. The weakness and lowered maturity is self evident because their response to any negative mention of their favorite framework is contrived hostility often expressed by calling the target of that hostility arrogant without any consideration for the technical concerns present.
Bad UI design has nothing to do with your coding framework of choice, it has everything to do with the design. Most programmers are not good designers. I cringed a bit at the background color of the OP's blog.
There's a reason that most people are unimaginative, because just like coding, design is hard. Design for multiple platforms (the whole point of using UI frameworks is easier multiplatform development) and multiple screen sizes is hard and takes a long time to both design and implement.
"Most programmers are not good designers." Unfortunately, most designers are not good designers, at least these days. I say that because from what I've heard, the UI abominations that are being rightly bemoaned on this thread are not things that the programmers decided to do--at least not at companies of any size--rather they're things the company's designers told the programmers to do.
Creativity and originality have tremendous amounts to do with solving UI problems. Here is an example of developers literally lost without a framework to tell them what to build:
There are many aspects of design that are at first challenging. I just watched this video about inventing a new basketball backboard and it took a lot of work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653 There will always be some minimal thought work to creating and testing any creative or original concept, but with practice the effort involved reduces considerably. Even though some minimal effort is required (as with any task) is not an excuse to avoid effort in the entirety. At some point it is just mental laziness.
Again, your choice of JS front end framework has nothing to do with the design of your UI. You can code the same design with React, Angular, vanilla JS, QT, etc. From what I've seen, most programmers are awful designers who overestimate their ability to design "usable" software. In particular, we forget that the vast majority of the time, we are not creating software for programmers.
The biggest problem I see though is lost imagination. Usability concerns seem all but completely and generally forgotten unless a given framework deliberately provides a dedicated convention for a specific usability concern.
Worse still is that many developers reliant upon a giant framework absolutely cannot imagine developing anything that is not the exact same SPA as their last SPA regardless of any usability concerns or business requirements. It’s like when you’re a hammer and everything is a nail mentality meets the most myopically crippled tunnel vision.
I used to have great disdain for large frameworks because they result in degraded application performance with limited capabilities and substantial bloat. Now I primarily loathe them because they are the primary excuse for weak under developed talent to self qualify progression as a lack of career maturity under the perfection of inept disdain. The weakness and lowered maturity is self evident because their response to any negative mention of their favorite framework is contrived hostility often expressed by calling the target of that hostility arrogant without any consideration for the technical concerns present.