Not necessarily.. I wonder had react not been backed by FB, it certainly would have had a beating in its popularity given lighter and arguably faster alternatives like vue. Remember, performance was one of the main argument React had when compare to Angular. Now since performance is no more a differentiating factor, developers might look into other aspects like better ROI in short and long term..
Just as one anecdotal data point, we didn't choose React for its performance when evaluating tools for our recent projects. (React can still be orders of magnitude slower than localised direct DOM updates on demand, after all, and in cases where performance really matters that might still be what you have to fall back on.)
The game-changer with React is that it presents a declarative way to specify your DOM content, which in turn can significantly reduce the number of cases you have to consider in your rendering and state management code, and it's fast enough to make that work in a lot of real world situations.
Could be for you, but have you wondered if React was say way slower than Angular and heavier, the adoption would have been much much lower?. Agreed, the model that React brought is superior but the catalyst was performance. They even highlighted performance as the main selling point with introducing the virtual dom, where the computation (dom querying) happens not in the dom but in the javascript, which is arguably faster and only differential updates are applied to the actual dom.
In my friend circle everyone wanted/were using Angular.js but it was too heavy for actual production use while react showed much better performance in the benchmarks (almost closer to Dom).
React and Angular are solutions to different problems. I don't think React would have succeeded without adequate performance, but I also don't think it is why React has been successful or the main reason it has displaced some of Angular's "market share"; being fast enough is necessary but not sufficient to do its job.
- it’s used at FB so all decisions they make are guided by their own practical needs: don’t break backwards ompatibility, don’t break tools, improve tools, create tools where none existed etc. etc. etc.
React team has a very pragmatic approach to development, and it shows.
Not true - Ractive is a library much like vue on the surface that came out _before_ React. It's all about timing, promotion and hitting a feature sweet spot.
MVVM was a thing for like that six month period in 2012 when backbone.js was causing callback hell and React.js hadn't come out yet, MVVM is an attempt to abstract over the callbacks.
