Is it even working for the developer though? Last I checked the server-side rendering performance for react based frameworks was somewhere like 200 pages per second? Is that something to be proud of as a developer?

React is absolutely performant. A developer who makes a slow React site would make a slow site with something else.

Tell that to all the former PHP developers. Where are these performant React sites? The largest and best tech companies out there certainly can’t do it.

The same former PHP developers responsible for all those slow WordPress sites?

The ones who made react.

Uh... I'm pretty sure Compass.com is running on Next.js...

They're a wide chasm between what one can make and what is led to making. React can lead to fast, responsive websites, though you'd be fighting against a current pulling you out to a bloated, buggy mess. There's a unique stench that comes from many react sites where everything is a skeleton screen, everything loads slowly, history rewriting is busted, there's no hotlinking, and scrolling is glitchy. Peek under the hood, it's almost always react. Facebook.com quality is the outlier, not the likely outcome.

React is far from performant for SSR, and it simply can’t be, as it wasn’t designed with backend needs in mind. The fact that it works at all is more of a happy accident or side effect. Current approaches are more like workarounds than proper solutions for making it function effectively on servers.

Most importantly, it’s also not particularly performant on the client side in real-world scenarios.

For evidence, here’s a guy testing major websites using his awesome react-scan tool: https://x.com/aidenybai/status/1861442057598062653