I myself have been guilty of spreading this "React is just the view" mentality as an easy argument to convince people to try it. However, in reality, you can't really compare framework X's view with React view just because they're both called "view". React's whole architecture and paradigm makes it so that you don't need controllers or, very often, not even models.

In this regard, "bang per byte downloaded" is very misleading (it already kinda is?).