> performance of front end frameworks is near the bottom of my evaluation checklist
Sorry to pick on this point but depending on your application this should be more (or much more) important. Too many teams have this same opinion and it's glaringly obvious how little they care about performance. I'd agree that raw performance isn't really important, but the ways you can and the tools you have to optimize the performance of the app are if you find that you have bottlenecks is and this does partially depend on the framework.
That said, I would agree, all frameworks would probably be fast enough for most use cases, and even with the optimization aspect arguably the most important aspects are about application structure and how the framework forces you to structure your application. As you mention, I think this is why React wins, the way it forces you to think about things unidirectionally, think about state and components separately, etc. are all big wins for understanding your application.
Also worth noting is that Svelte doesn't really have a big company backing it like React does and so the ecosystem is smaller, which could contribute to its relatively small size.
Maybe I worded that incorrectly - yes performance is important. But the negligible gains between framework x and framework y are not high on my evaluation checklist, as long as the minimum performance requirement is met (which is often dictated by the product requirements).
I've been working in React for ~4 years now, at all types of scale. While I've definitely seen performance issues, it's never been a case of a flaw in the approach the React takes.
I guess a better way to phrase my point - until I encounter a scenario where the performance is bad enough in React to warrant looking at other frameworks, choosing a framework based on pure performance is an over-optimization.
Of course, this would be a different conversation if React was known for being the one and only bottleneck in web app performance - but afaik that is a rare case.
Sorry to pick on this point but depending on your application this should be more (or much more) important. Too many teams have this same opinion and it's glaringly obvious how little they care about performance. I'd agree that raw performance isn't really important, but the ways you can and the tools you have to optimize the performance of the app are if you find that you have bottlenecks is and this does partially depend on the framework.
That said, I would agree, all frameworks would probably be fast enough for most use cases, and even with the optimization aspect arguably the most important aspects are about application structure and how the framework forces you to structure your application. As you mention, I think this is why React wins, the way it forces you to think about things unidirectionally, think about state and components separately, etc. are all big wins for understanding your application.
Also worth noting is that Svelte doesn't really have a big company backing it like React does and so the ecosystem is smaller, which could contribute to its relatively small size.