Poorly written react code isn't performant and removing the Virtual DOM will not fix your problem. It's a hill I'm willing to die on. Many engineers seem to struggle with unnecessary re-renders, to the point where I see long tasks in the performance tab. Clicking a button shouldn't lock the UI thread for 2 seconds.
I don't think that many junior/early mid React developers know that the whole tree gets re-rendered.
Those that do, I don't think they fully understand when and where to `useMemo` and `useCallback` to optimize. It tends to get overused or used in a way that doesn't actually memoize the parts of the component that doesn't change.
Then adding in state management only makes it more complicated in some cases depending on the state paradigm.
It's a mystery that React is as prevalent as it is given how hard it is to actually do well. I think Solid.js and Vue have a much cleaner paradigm as far as re-renders goes (with React being explicit opt-out and Solid and Vue being opt-in).
You're right. There is some cognitive bias, when I was a junior, I didn't lean on useMemo in the way I see today's juniors using it. The mis-applications revealed that some engineers don't totally get the paradigm, and that is a weakness. Most seem to get, at a high level, that "fn(data) = view" but then caught up of the weeds of unnecessary memo'ing to paper over performance issues.
I think if you take someone who isn't too skilled in React, and then give them a different framework, that you'll end up with too much different of a result. I don't write much Vue, so I don't know what performance issues there look like, but I do know it isn't discussed much since it has a much smaller market share. If going VDOM-less really is a silver bullet, I'd be curious to hear more.
