Agreed I believe the performance perception is an outgrowth of following on the tail of Angular which was a significant step back in performance from the frameworks and toolkits that proceeded it. Prototype, Dojo, YUI, jQuery et. al. did not suffer from significant performance problems for the run of the mill problem domains. Granted the early frameworks where more focused on components than application architecture but even Backbone did not suffer from the abysmal performance problems that plagued Angular.<p>One issue I have with the article is that it reads like React was the first framework to bring componentized and encapsulated UI elements to the party, when in fact that was the norm for frameworks before Backbone and Angular. Specifically Dojo and YUI where heavily focused on components.