A lot of other frameworks/libraries are faster than React. I know React used to be touted as the fastest option, but the reality is that it isn't.

Probably from here: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

Hyperapp does outperform React in most benchmarks (along with many other frameworks). Not sure how the "2x" was measured, though.

At 1.7K I'm not surprised by this, and I'm not sure why you would be. React is plenty bloated, not saying it's badly coded, but it's a larger codebase than many other SPA frameworks. This one in particular seems to be using as much of native JS code as possible.

How much faster is vanilla DOM API calls compared to all other transient DOM API abstraction libraries?

Haven't seen the numbers but in most benchmarks React.js isn't the quickest.