It's also easy to confuse problems that arise from failing to adequately manage the gotchas with problems inherent in the tool itself. There's a subtle distinction there that's easy to miss, especially for those with a blame-the-system sort of attitude (which I don't entirely fault).

One company I worked for had a very slow frontend. It was common there to blame the slowness on React. "React is just kind of slow."

Another company I worked for had a much larger React-based frontend, and it was fast-loading and snappy by comparison.

The difference is that the second company had much more well-established good practices in its design system, the codebase, the enforced lint checks, and the general knowledge of its engineers. They avoided performance traps that caused multiple renders of things. (The first company's frontend would render a given screen 12+ times for some state changes.)