That being said, if I were a front end developer, I would look at the job openings and see most jobs ask for React experience and be more concerned with resume driven development.
That's part of the problem and it's a vicious circle.
And most people like React and I can understand that. It's easy to use and understand. At least at first (debugging subtle (performance or not) bugs related to React's model is… not always easy but these bugs usually arrive when your app is already big enough. This is probably true of any framework).
What's more, most people are not that sensitive to performance and if they are, they might not be aware of React's problems before learning it and practicing (which is also true of any framework).
And also, nobody is fired for picking React.
It's sending incredible bloat powered by inefficient frameworks and programming practices, and careless use of the bandwidth.
There are frameworks and programming practices that allow doing the same things without burning people's computers and making people wait. Making people wait and burning their bandwidth and data plan is just disrespectful but nobody cares as long as the app works fine on the customer's new phone or laptop.
I'm saying it as someone who does frontend development so it's not just guessing.
I'm writing a Svelte SMS app whose whole frontend is 3 times less heavy than just React itself, and fast on underpowered hardware. I've also built a networked Scrabble game that's instantaneous on an iPad from 2010. I've not focused on performance. This stuff is not impossible to figure out. It's just that these apps don't need to produce and diff entire virtual doms on every mouse move, do not come with custom web fonts, do not embed an entire icon pack of which 10 icons are used, do not use a 100 kb CSS reset framework, do not use 4K images to draw buttons and do not bundle the whole npm planet to work. The amount of features provided by current browser engines is incredible and it is possible to build amazing things by embracing them without breaking a sweat.
React and this state of the frontend world depress me.
It's okay to do client side computation. Just don't do it by sending megabytes of interpreted code for that.