Completely seriously, and I don’t think this is particularly controversial: outperforming React is not impressive. React was never particularly good at performance—VDOM is fundamentally overhead, and there are a variety of faster and lighter techniques employed by various competitors, and even among VDOM libraries it’s not as fast as it could be. React sold itself as fast initially, but what it was faster than (rebuilding the entire DOM on any update) was a strawman.

It’s not hard to be faster than React while exposing broadly similar functionality. If you’re making something for your own usage only, it’s even easier to beat it.

Same as op, I rewrote away from react my Dropbox alternative (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) in vanilla js a couple years back around the idea that components are plain exported functions like this:

  export default function component(render) {
      const $dom = xxxx
      render($dom);
  }