> The overhead involved in building a react app is nearly nil with all the tooling we have.

All the tooling we have is exactly why React has an overhead which is far from nil. Every package goes through a period of changing its best practices, some go through multiple. Entire packages go in and out of season, seemingly depending on the phase of the moon. There's a new bundler every year, each with its own quirks. For some things there's 4 "go to" packages that achieve the same thing but take a different path to get there. You have all these packages and tooling you have to learn, stay in touch with, maintain and fight against. All of that so you could ship megabytes of JS that ultimately just changes some text on a page. You can do all of that with vanilla JS and spare yourself the headache.