https://github.com/dakom/react-pixi-bunnymark
Is the bottleneck React itself? I've tried a few different things you can see there (introducing mutability, using PureComponent, etc.) but the numbers are still not great (it should be able to hit 10,000 bunnies at 60fps easily without a hiccup on a consumer desktop pc, I get slowdowns way before that)
Someone mentioned looking into how React-Native does things and somehow replacing the renderer... but I'm not sure if that's really very different from what's happening here since ultimately the drawing is done by rendering null and pushing commands to PIXI. In other words the render tree really is just in-memory classes, there's nothing pixi's actually rendering when you get to the end of the line, so I'm not sure if replacing the renderer is worth the headache (there's no bunny-mark on the pixi-react project but I've opened an issue to ask for one so maybe if they can beat this, there's hope).
Looking for some veteran advice before I go down this rabbit-hole (pun intended). Like most things with performance tuning, theory is nice but if you can prove your suggestion by showing the gains either with a fork or a similar showcase, that's much better (500 cells on a page doesn't count, even at like 3,000 bunnies this is fine)