Mithril looks very nice. I will look into that and see what happens in there.
I understand your frustrations with AngularJs, I went through them as well, but still think that AngularJs is a great framework as BackboneJs and EmberJs and it has its strength and weaknesses.
ReactJs especially helps if there are more items to display (long list, classic ng-repeat).
But better rendering performance is not only on initial DOM rendering but on every update of the data. So this greatly improves usability for the user as the WebApp seems more reactive to input.
Mobile Webapps should provide feedback to the user as fast as possible on input. With long lists that has been quite problematic so far, and I have been looking for solutions to make the DOM update faster. ReactJs is a great help here.