We, your users, do deal with it. Constantly. Usually, we deal with it by waiting 30 seconds for your single-page application blog article to load because we only get intermittent 3G reception on the metro.
I don't really care what sort of frameworks you like. Stop building shit webapps!
Problem with your mac? I'm getting 2.23 seconds to open new message window from your link on a maxed out Lenovo X270 running Ubuntu 18.04 via Chromium. Mind you, I'm also on Gigabit internet. So yeah, Gmail is fucking slow.
Trying it out with Chromium, it loaded the direct link after 3.88 seconds. Trying it out with Safari, it loaded the direct link after 6.27 seconds.
Firefox is pretty fast most of the time. Google's web apps are the only things that performs so poorly on it. I don't understand how they can have such a drastic performance disparity between browsers. Maybe they're just not testing enough on Firefox.
Also if you haven't taken a look in the last 6 months, I would. Things have REALLY started to solidify and come together. They are also 2/3rds of the way through Windows support, which is the main barrier right now to 1.0. Nothing else significant is going to change before 1.0 AFAIK, and it's my job to know.
Still better than the node js ecosystem imo. We are using Amber in production, and it's been a pretty good experience. We control the Dockerfile so we aren't pressured to upgrade things the moment a breaking change comes out, but we stay on top of it.
I can also work faster with the React ecosystem (and find it much more enjoyable) than RoR and SSR makes the end result the same anyway.
People like component-based frameworks and modern JavaScript (and its supersets). Things are different now. Deal with it!