There was no way to make async rendering possible with classes. It was necessary and they spent a lot of time trying different approaches that'd continue the old paradigm, but it couldn't be done.
As opposed to what? Vue is slower and Angular too. Perhaps Svelte might be faster but the programming paradigm is a little weird. Writing pure JS is bullshit - I tried it few months ago and even a very simple app - for public transport schedules - got very unmanageable very quickly.
I'm currently working on a project with hundreds of reactive components shown at any given time (very extensive financial analytics/modeling collected from over 500 data sources and real-time updated). Async rendering is a godsend. Perhaps React isn't for you if you don't see the need.
Lol, you really think someone is going to stray off the well-supported path for apps like these for 1-10% gain? This app shows a loading indicator quite a lot. Speed is important but nobody cares about raw speed this much. What we care about is a well-maintained library with significant ecosystem that's still going to be there in 2030 and it's super-easy to find devs and/or get help. The libs there are beta quality at best - maybe in few years.
The point is I'm not going to compare against small libs with no ecosystem, slow maintenance, small community and low amount of developers ready to use it - these new libs sound nice but it's beta software, not something to be used in production for apps like I work on. Speed is important but not this important.
What remains is React, Angular and Vue - and out of these React wins by a huge margin, also thanks to async rendering.
I'm looking forward having another look at the remaining libs in a few years.
