> Idk why people claim React is bloat

Because it's very hard to control it's rendering model. And the fact that multi billion dollar startups and multi trillion dollar companies hiring ivy league charlatans still have bloated low-performing websites written in react (that don't even need react...) clearly states the issues aren't that trivial.

> React has always been tracking what component relies on what state, independent of the compiler.

This still needs a complete parsing and analysis of your components and expressions. Which is why there is no single very performing UI library that can avoid directives.

As someone that spend many days on performance I will tell you that bundle size have minimal impact on performance. In most cases backend dominate any performance discussion.

Apps are slow because caching is missing, naive pagination, poorly written API calls waterfall, missing db indexes, bad data model, database choice or slow serverless environment. Extra 1MB of bundle add maybe 100ms to one time initial load of app that can mitigated trivially with code splitting.

You can write slow, unperforming code in whatever framework and language you like. React is not particular slow, nor particularly bloated compare to competition.