The organizational and maintainability benefits you get from using something like react far out weigh the actually quite minor file size bump. That is the least of your worries.
source: myself; someone who moved to working on a project entirely written in vanilla JS… which has just become its own bespoke framework.
It also benefits users in that you can implement more features and fix more bugs in less time. Performance is a feature and what that means is that while you can't just completely ignore it, it's not always the highest priority.
source: myself; someone who moved to working on a project entirely written in vanilla JS… which has just become its own bespoke framework.