You are right: Nue takes inspiration from Vue 2.0, petite-vue and Riot.
I'll make the comparison more fair, but it doesn't take out the fact that React/Vue promote use of "spaghetti" code where logic/layout/styling are mixed together making the code hard to read and causes the size to grow. Everywhere I look the projects are unnecessarily big. Very often in the factor of 10x too big.
Pretty sure Nue JS will always need a build step. I don't like the idea to load the compiler and run JS exec() on the client side. Heavy and unsecure.
Haven't checked performance yet. I want to see this project getting more traction before deep diving to benchmarking