That's more an indictment of node's ecosystem and package management than anything else. Having helper libs for almost everything along with multiple versions of the same modules bundled is just a bit ridiculous. With functional deduplication across versions and a more robust standard library so people didn't need to add 50 NPM modules to do anything that would drop by an order of magnitude.
Beyond that, bundle splitting with lazy loading is very helpful, but it requires knowing that you can do it and some additional work on top of baseline bundling. Then you're nearly at parity with static sites in terms of individual page download requirements for the first view (assuming react/etc are cached CDN libs rather than bundled) but each subsequent view of that page is much smaller, faster and more responsive than static html.
There are definitely use cases where you want a render loop in web, pioneered by React, instead of traditional approaches for a web application. I think the pendulum swung too far and too many sites are being built as a SPA, but there are absolutely some "very good reasons" to build a SPA with React. As always, it depends on the use case.
