The bundle is 2.8 Mb uncompressed, ~800Kb compressed.
Even if compressed and minified, that's still a huge amount of JS statements that the interpreter has to go through.
I'm getting about 2 seconds to DomContentLoaded on my iMac and a reasonably fast cable connection. Four seconds to visible content on my Nexus 5X on same connection.
This is the kind of crap that makes the web feel so lame and clunky on mobile (and on desktops too even sometimes).
For reference, it's not necessarily react or redux, or whatever else is in use... I've managed to get preact+redux in a 20k (gz) bundle for a standalone, usable component, flushing out an app may triple that size, but if you're judicious with your components, it's not too hard.
Then again, Immutable.js is about 15kb on it's own, and a few other heavy hitters and you'll hit 100kb (gz) load before much functionality. That said, I think a 500kb target for a web app isn't too bad, this does exceed that, but not sure if certain bits (image references, fonts, etc) are part of the actual JS bundle, which will bloat it out a lot.
React has a lot more sanity checks in place, but that comes at a cost. For a component, it's too much of a price to pay... for a full-blown application, it's usually well worth it. For a component, 20kb is pushing it... for an application, generally 500k would be the limit in my mind. Which is pretty easily hit regardless of the framework, but too many applications include various libraries willy nilly....
Often times you will wind up with competing libraries that both get installed... You'll get all of lodash, and all of Ramda... you'll get all of jQuery, and a few other tools because you're bringing in one component. Working on larger applications with people less judicious as to what they bring in results in a lot of bloat... more so when it's easier to bring something in (thanks to webpack/babel), and while I appreciate that, it's a tool that's easy to abuse.
In the end, you can get react+redux in under 100kb, you can get a lot of the app boilerplate for a mid-sized app well under 200kb... I would compare this to angular, or ng2 that tend to be much bigger. In the end it's how you are building.
Beyond this, as I said, I didn't really look into the bundle... depending on configuration it could be including images, fonts and css. Which would mean it's really not that bad, though it should probably be using url-loader for a lot of the assets to break into separate downloads. Also, react-icons is much better when only needing a few icons from the libraries, they're also well normalized to mix/match in terms of size/position than the fonts tend to be.
While 700 Kb is sort-of-acceptable in terms of data usage, the execution of 2.8 Mb of JS is quite taxing on the browser: on my 2010 MacBook Pro it takes 4-5 seconds to show the text on the page, even when bundle.js is cached...
I'm also getting a 2.8mb file, which the server is having trouble sending in a reasonable timeframe under the heavy load HN is putting it under right now.
Even if compressed and minified, that's still a huge amount of JS statements that the interpreter has to go through.
I'm getting about 2 seconds to DomContentLoaded on my iMac and a reasonably fast cable connection. Four seconds to visible content on my Nexus 5X on same connection.
This is the kind of crap that makes the web feel so lame and clunky on mobile (and on desktops too even sometimes).