The point is that you push more work to the browser, which has let us get a lot more load performance, much smaller bundle sizes, and much snappier apps and mobile websites (PWAs). We use React and Angular quite a bit internally at Ionic and the reality is that both produce very large code bundles and pulling those apart is proving to be a really hard technical challenge.
We're not throwing in the towel at all, rather we're embracing web standards 100% and think Ionic is and will continue to be the best way to build an app that works in the app stores, on the web as a PWA, and increasingly on desktop. Cross-platform is our main focus.