alt Hacker NewsIMO talking about the “heaviness” of popular web frameworks is way too simplistic to be actually meaningful.
How light or heavy an app feels, in my experience, has very little to do with initial bundle size, and far more to do with how adeptly the developers have solved the distributed systems problems of their app.
Are images compressed and cached on a CDN? Is linked content pre-fetched? Does the app avoid unnecessary roundtrips to the server?
These are the questions that truly matter, IMHO. They’re also things that junior devs are likely to get wrong.
All that said, I agree that you tend to see far more sluggish websites written in React than in any other framework. But personally, I think that’s a consequence of React being popular, and attracting a larger proportion of devs who miss important details.
I share this opinion of Electron, BTW.
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> Does the app avoid unnecessary roundtrips to the server?
Guess what, using server-rendered pages avoids all unnecessary roundtrips by definition, because the entire page is loaded in one go. You can augment a server-rendered site with client-side SPA features for seamless interaction within the page, but that's not a key requirement either.
And importantly, does the app have clear loading states when it has to block on something? Making sure something happens immediately can make things feel fast even if you're waiting on the network.