I'm not sure that's a fair explanation for why. It's totally possible to come up with new paradigms that are useful even though nobody's thought of them before.
I would think the main issue will be around JavaScript's tendency (cultural, syntactic, etc) to casually create and release objects all over the place, constantly. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it seems problematic for this use-case.
Example: JavaScript doesn't have named function parameters, because instead you just create and destructure an object:
function foo({ param1, param2, param3 }) {
}
foo({ param1: 'a', param2: 'b', param3: 'c' })
Despite that, I think people are onto something with the broader idea of coding a 3D scene declaratively. I'm just skeptical that React or its norms are the right path to doing it at scale.
I agree on the performance aspect, any inner-loop stuff always was down in a native language or heavily JIT'd path, but even then data layout drove it even more which usually required structuring the upstream systems ahead of the core logic. It's the reason why there's no "one-size fits all" game engine. They all make very discrete trade-offs in terms of entity counts, open world vs constrained layout and the like.