And this coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the web and the end of desktop GUI supremacy. The few big desktop successes in the 2000s (uTorrent, DropBox) often used no framework at all or had minimalist UIs where they used little-known corners of the OS but moved the heavy interface lifting to the web.
I'm wondering if this is part of the general pattern of things reaching perfection just as they become obsolete. Right when a technology reaches mainstream adoption, everyone has an opinion about how to do it "right", and right as it reaches mainstream adoption, all the major opportunities have been plucked clean.
If it would take 25ms in vanilla JS (40x quicker) I'd still consider it a small efficiency gain in our case (from a users perspective).
---
(should mention that there is no network latency, since it's an installed app the JS-code is bundled, obviously)
Yes using a JS Framework is going to be slower than writing and optimizing code by hand. In the same way that you can do faster code in assembler than using any languages or that using GTK on top of X is going to be slower than writing directly to the graphic card.
Yet we still uses them because it mean less bugs (because you are not reinventing the wheel every time), it encourage code reuse, it add structure, allow other dev to easily enter the code and open you to a vast library of modules. But most importantly it allow shipping features faster and that's where it impact the users.
Users care more about having an usable product than a fast one that does nothing (with some exceptions obviously). We can afford to optimize everything by hand and ship at the same time.
Sure, in some use-cases it will be too slow, but then you identify those particulars cases and you take your time to optimize them. Even by bypassing the framework if you need to.
But don't decide to not use a framework because the general use case will be a bit slower.
Or as Knuth put it decades ago "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
The complete quote being, because it's relevant here:
> "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%"