PostgreSQL is also my go-to database for anything relational. My only issue with it though, is the need to run vacuum full (which locks tables for significant amount of time) to free up disk space to the operating system.
Thanks for the feedback! We've found that in most cases the components you've built tend to be much larger than React itself, and indeed if we can reduce the size of your components by adding things to React then that is often a good tradeoff for us.
However we do try to keep the size down; for example React 16 included a 30% size reduction.
When you say "the overhead of react is far too great" are you speaking from something you tried that didn't work? I haven't heard any stories like this so would be interested to hear more if React was actually too slow for you.
(We're also working on our own optimizing compiler, but it's still a very experimental project at this stage.)
I'm playing around with react-dom-lite, and frankly it's exactly what I need - I'm getting less worried about IE support by the day, and it drops the bundle size by quite a bit.
I'd love to see React itself ship with options to drop polyfills and old browser support if it helps the bundle size.