It wasn't just react, I was definitely doing unneeded state changes, and I got it to the point now where there is no noticeable delay.
One big issue was that I wanted dependent fields to update as-you-type, which also meant validating as-you-type. I added a timer to delay that so that this wasn't all running on every single key-stroke, but wouldn't update until you stopped typing.
Reducing the number of dependent values in the DOM tree at a single time helped a lot too, and there were logical categories to split them into. My validation code was not particularly optimized either, since it was originally designed for batch-processing.
I really don't get huge concerns people have with performance. I find chrome's profiling tools to be very primitive to what I'm used to, but they were more than adequate for me to steadily improve performance.
There's probably still some improvements to be had, but right now there's no issues with responsiveness on mobile, so I stopped looking.
I can totally empathize with the large form woes, having worked on a couple of similar client projects with similarly unusual requirements. Angular (the first version, I hear awesome things about the latest), in particular, fell down hard when managing a very large number of semi-dependent input fields. We ended up customizing large swaths of its collection diffing code to gain minor performance increases before designing a pure JS solution that was very performant, if very expensive and time-consuming to implement. I have no reason to think that React would have fared any better in either case.
One big issue was that I wanted dependent fields to update as-you-type, which also meant validating as-you-type. I added a timer to delay that so that this wasn't all running on every single key-stroke, but wouldn't update until you stopped typing.
Reducing the number of dependent values in the DOM tree at a single time helped a lot too, and there were logical categories to split them into. My validation code was not particularly optimized either, since it was originally designed for batch-processing.
I really don't get huge concerns people have with performance. I find chrome's profiling tools to be very primitive to what I'm used to, but they were more than adequate for me to steadily improve performance.
There's probably still some improvements to be had, but right now there's no issues with responsiveness on mobile, so I stopped looking.