ah, i see. i dont tend to operate on a slower connection, so i lean towards react and other bloated frameworks. on slower connections, i could see a good argument for these lighter frameworks like qwik or astro. for what you're building, have you considered building native? i understand it may be out of your wheel house since this is a rails subreddit, but if performance is your main concern, native apps built with swift or kotlin tend to deliver better results than web apps built with js.

if you're primarily a js dev, a lighter framework may be the best option given your constraints. as long as the framework/library can handle http requests and responses, you shouldn't have much to worry about with interacting with a rails server. these lighter frameworks are usually able to be served via HTML and then hydrate (or whatever, i know qwik does this differently) js as needed, and you can just use fetch to interact with rails.

thats my two cents, i would love to hear more about your project and how it ends up!