As for the tech framing - I imagine you'll get lots of responses on that, and I'm sure it works for some people. Speaking personally, I think it irks me in particular because I feel that "React is slow" isn't really true -- but hey, we can sidestep that whole argument if you just tell me that your app loads a 100GB text file in 0.1ms or whatever :)
On the React thing, I never said React is slow! I think it's great for a lot of things. I just chose a different path because I wanted to understand every part of the main product stack. I didn't use OT or CDRT for the same reason... :|