The argument that React will be heavier than your own implementation is clearly true.
The argument that it'll take less time to develop, document, and test your own implementation than to take advantage of the React ecosystem is clearly untrue.
As the public demands higher quality images and video, code weight matters less and less. If you're not serving up 3mb+ of high-res images and/or video and making multiple AJAX calls, your site is highly specialized and outside of the mainstream. It's not an insult or a judgement, it's an easily verifiable fact by looking at Alexa ratings.
If you need to save 50-100kb that badly, use a slightly smaller image file or a slightly shorter video, don't add hundreds to thousands of hours of dev time. And if you're developing for mobile, do as much server-side rendering as you can and add a debounce for potentially costly operations, it's really not that hard.
The argument that it'll take less time to develop, document, and test your own implementation than to take advantage of the React ecosystem is clearly untrue.
As the public demands higher quality images and video, code weight matters less and less. If you're not serving up 3mb+ of high-res images and/or video and making multiple AJAX calls, your site is highly specialized and outside of the mainstream. It's not an insult or a judgement, it's an easily verifiable fact by looking at Alexa ratings.
If you need to save 50-100kb that badly, use a slightly smaller image file or a slightly shorter video, don't add hundreds to thousands of hours of dev time. And if you're developing for mobile, do as much server-side rendering as you can and add a debounce for potentially costly operations, it's really not that hard.