Nobody looks at objective benchmarks. My own DOM utility is faster than React.js, and in fact it is not such a difficult feat, there are a few DOM utilities which are faster, also authored by relative nobodies.
I don't worry about catering to IE8 users, neither do most websites, and that number is vanishingly small. I'm also not interested in competing on complexity, which is what happens when one preemptively builds for edge cases.
I will probably never work on a web app that has a wider reach than Facebook. Setting up arbitrary personal goals for success like working on "one of the busiest social sites in the world" and even achieving that won't make me any happier. How much is enough? I've already proven that I beat Facebook at the DOM performance game, and still I'm the Dunning-Kruger idiot.
I've did Mithril for 6 months year an half ago, before that Ember.js for two years and Angular.js for year even before that. I've eventually settled with React.js because it was just view library, with everything else up to you.
https://mithril.js.org/jsx.html
I've never needed any of the others, not sure.
In fact I refuse to market my pet project as if it is something to be bought and sold. or to assign it a valuation based on how many big companies are using it.
I've been in same situation once with my OS project. I've did something small that I've been certain does what all those other heavier solutions do. But when users came I've learned that there's unimaginable number of edge cases and scenarios that are common enough to require annoying amount of work.
React.js is not "DOM utility". Its battletested view library running one of busiest social sites in the world. It's highly performant, capable of handling thousands of components at single time, and handles countless edge cases, like maintaining input state while user is typing in it and its moved around DOM, normalizing events between browsers, maintaining scroll between large redraws or jumping user to components #fragment.
Ember.js and Angular are complete app frameworks that implement view, layers, services, data, communications testing, tooling and more. Those are solid options for people writing dashboard applications (think intercom or Podio), even if they are losing ground in public-facing sites to more elastic stacks like React or Vue.