Unfortunately the author appears to have both a problem with react and a problem with men and appears to struggle to separate those two concerns, and this blog post is worse off for it.
On the topic of react, it took off precisely because it performed so much better than what was hot at the time (angular, now known as angularjs; jquery), and that includes on older devices.
Unfortunately that performance came at a price of a complex "developer story" which later improvements such as flux (and then to a better degree, redux) helped mitigate. Eventually enough improvements to the developer flow have landed the ecosystem back at "performance can suck sometimes".
A global immutable state isn't going to be the best for razor sharp performance, but it's easy to reason about, so provides a way to deliver reliable applications with mixed ability teams.
The alternative is having to reason about state at all kinds of levels which can be far more performant but will likely end up with more bugs.
That said, the later part of the article starts projecting a lot of bad things on React which it isn't to blame for. The commodification of the web has react to blame? It's an assertion with no evidence.