There's a lot of people in web development who are full of shit. You can tell who they are when they claim that JS or the DOM is slow unless you use X framework. What they either don't understand or ignore is that frameworks are for the developer, not the computer. If you are a fool, a framework isn't going to stop you from making really bad choices and over-engineering something into oblivion. Years from now, there will be people claiming that React is "too slow" or "too bloated" or "too complicated", and it will be abandoned for the next greatest thing. Some of this also has to do with the fact that there are lots of wild-eyed entrepreneurial types who either want to work for FAANG or have a startup that they believe will compete with FAANG. Thus, they only believe in the latest and greatest thing.

The secret, or perhaps not-so-secret, is that the vast majority of web applications are still CRUD, and the average person doesn't understand the difference between a SPA and a server-rendered app. Most of the engineering effort that goes beyond that is probably a waste of time unless you really plan on doing things beyond CRUD. So the best thing is to actually understand the fundamentals, learn to do a good job at those, and use the tools that make sense for said job. That means that maybe, just maybe, your WebGL game doesn't need to use React.