I've had a similar experience on a current project. Even after disabling any and all caching and minification (read: basically parsing all templates per reques

I've had a similar experience on a current project. Even after disabling any and all caching and minification (read: basically parsing all templates per request, a bit like PHP), the entire render process take less than 20ms of time to the point that I've simply left out caching during some production runs. I also keep the interface free of any expensive rendering precisely because I don't really need all of the niceties of JS frameworks. Surely, the page could be more fancy but vanilla HTML5/CSS3/JS can do the job too. (And document.querySelector has replaced jQuery for me)