alt Hacker NewsWhy would react fail for higher traffic pages?
If it's a traditional React SPA, you can use a versioned bundle with immutable caching and each user only has to download your bundle when you release an update or they use a new browser. You will need to think about how you handle spikes in traffic when you do a release, but even then users won't all load your page immediately after you bump the version.
Most of the time (existing user using the same browser, no update) there will be precisely zero traffic to your servers to load the React app except for the initial HTML skeleton.
For an app using SSR it's more complicated and I'll admit I don't know how that works at very high load
I had landing pages using React on a 1.6M/m budget. The loading times on cell phones in mainland USA meant we had people cancelling the loading of pages. When we converted to straight up cached HTML we saw a huge increase in full page loads.
People weren't cancelling the page load and surfing back anymore. You cannot argue that React is extremely heavy and also adds a lot of time between first render. Test a normal HTMX page in Lighthouse and then convert it to React and you'll see how drastic things are.
People use React today out of habit rather than because it's the best tool for the job.