In general:

    how much code the browser needs to parse and execute on every page load

The caveat being that that code only needs to be parsed and executed once in a single page application.

    weight of execution payloads across operations in your app

Presumably this cost is providing value to the developer in terms of reduced development time, reduced complexity, or improved correctness. You shouldn't typically incur significant wasted cost in execution, just a selection of tradeoff. Besides, rendering to DOM is still the longest tentpole by far compared to microseconds for JS execution.

EDIT: With regards to the "independent test," that is in no way a realistic use case. You would never add items to the DOM individually when you're in that tight of a loop. You would instead build up a cache and write once. The only thing of consequence that is being measured in that benchmark is each framework's DOM insertion speed.