Based on work done by svelte and solid, I think it is possible to shave base react down to half its current size, but it appears nobody (inside or outside of Meta) is willing to take on this challenge.

Unfortunately, the tradeoffs are still in favor of react and will continue to be in favor of react for the foreseeable future.

Most importantly it is next to impossible to get developers to give up DX (and muscle memory) for smaller JS bundles.