A someone who's been developing for the web for a living since the late 1990s, I agree that nothing absolves the web developer of the need to understand web fundamentals. But laying blame for bloated SPAs at React's feet is misplaced. With SSR, you can ship React apps that work with JS disabled. And with static extraction (a la vanilla-extract) you can do CSS-in-JS with 0 runtime overhead. Being mindful of bundle size and user-perceived performance is essential. For those that pay attention and leverage the web properly as a platform, amazing performance (and capabilities / UX) with React is achievable. See https://Remix.run.