We picked react with mui and indeed have many performance issues; we redid a part with tailwind and vanilla js en the difference in perf is quite bizar. But indeed more (a lot more) work.
Yeah if you want good performance out of a non-trivial React app you need to carefully consider memoization. It can become quite tedious making sure you've memoized the right things at the right places.
MUI also can be slow if you put dynamic stuff in the sx component property. Tailwind has the very nice property that there's no dynamic CSS generation at runtime.
