I can agree about the bloat and the useless computations. Although you can build easy isomorphic apps by just using
and you can combine it with:
this is at least how I would do it these days. The react / etc eco system are tackling problems way out of scope for the normal person
for bigger teams it's just a review / convention cycle that's actually needed and maybe prettier / typescript (I would use typescript but that's taste)
the question of source and abstraction is a different ones. These days the industry dominates the ideas they want 'more' all the time this is why we don't educate our developers anymore we push the through the meat grinder and slap fancy terms on things.
I can go on about on how many levels we are doing the wrong things but that's just my opinion and they are in flux since I reflect regularly on them.
I think we tend to over engineere things for engineering sake. Sometime going back to the basics on a natural evolved system makes things a lot more understandable and easier than using those 'complex' structures with transpilers, pipeline, plugins, super sets .... etc.
Our customer service and time to market overshadow that we're wasting energy on a scale that does not reek the benefits so often claimed by the agents of the technologies. ... in other word using react/vue/any dynamic frontend lib for a static page should not be seen as good outside of experimentation.
Anyhow ... I ramble ... I hope that the declarative model with enhancements comes back and we slowly can go back to a 'normal' web.
Although I am a professional so I understand why it happens and I use react and other frameworks in my daily life.... I still don't have to like it :)