>you’ll get molasses if you naively build a spreadsheet in react.

I digged a bit more on other real world applications. Found two interesting posts from atom text editor implementors. [1] Why they moved to React. [2] Decision to implement text editor DOM updates manually instead of via React

[1] https://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-to-react.html [2] https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/5624