60k is a big issue if your users are on older smartphones. I'm tired of people equating the time it takes to download an image in the background with the render blocking cpu-crunching parsing that javascript requires.
A one-off event for a single-page-app which is likely to be used for more than a few minutes, and if performance of old mobile users matters then a native app is necessary, period.
If you're talking about a webpage then yes that would be awful.
There are several things to consider with download time:
- is this a website? why on earth do you need react or anything for a website?
- is this a single page web application? then to develop with a medium sized team and an increasing feature set its nice to pick a language and library/framework that enable that.
- do you really care about mobile users performance and bandwidth? then you need a native app
This is all unrelated to the article, which is merely an uninformed rant about someone who doesn't understand the point of immutability and its use within functional programming as opposed to shoe-horning it into imperative code.
Your point about the need for a native app is going to raise hackles on web devs who want to "do mobile development" without paying their dues by learning the platform.
You can add JIT too :) More JS, more time needed to reach decent runtime speed post JIT. React's first render is very slow.