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.
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).