The thing is that you can still have high-level abstractions without them needing to be as slow as React. React does a slow thing by default (rerendering every child component whenever state changes, so every component in the UI if top-level state is changing), and then requires careful optimisation to correct for that decision.

But you can also just... update the right DOM element directly, whenever a state changes that would cause it to be updated. You don't need to create mountains of VDOM only to throw it away, nor do you need to rerender entire components.

This is how SolidJS, Svelte, and more recently Vue work. They use signals and effects to track which state is used in which parts of the application, and update only the necessary parts of the DOM. The result is significantly more performant, especially for deeply nested component trees, because you're just doing way less work in total. But the kicker is that these frameworks aren't any less high-level or easy-to-use. SolidJS looks basically the same as React, just with some of the intermediate computations wrapped in functions. Vue is one of the most popular frameworks around. And yet all three perform at a similar level to if you'd built the application using optimal vanilla JavaScript.