Sacrificing performance for a cleaner programming model is a reasonable tradeoff, it's weird that it's being criticized as though it were a matter of principle.
I'm very much a backend person and I don't like React either -- as far as I'm concerned raw HTML on a webpage as God intended peak UI -- but if you're writing full webapps you're going to need some form of framework regardless.
A webpage rendering Xms faster has negative value if it e.g. took 3 months longer to hire the programmer responsible for writing it, or if that programmer costs $100,000/yr more, or if training them to proficiency took 6 months, etc etc. The advantages of well-known frameworks are very real to the business, they just offend some programmers' sensibilities which should be simply ignored.
In any case, the IBM analog is also weird/wrong. The takeaway from IBM has to do with bureaucratic decision-making and especially the principal-agent conflict between people who buy systems like IBM and people who have to use them. I have never seen a similar dynamic be responsible for the decision to use React. There is no React salesperson wining and dining the C-suite.
Amen. This is the classical principal/agent problem and affects everyone all the time, not just programmers. But the amount of disregard for the overall business goal can be astounding.
Then you are the right audience for something like HTMX.