Drei, and the cost of a nice abstraction

Drei is a collection of ready-made components, controls, loaders, environment maps, text, instancing helpers, performance monitors, and it is genuinely the reason R3F projects ship quickly. Take the ones that encapsulate real complexity, such as environment lighting or text rendering, without hesitation.

Be more careful with the ones that hide a decision. A drop-in controls component picks damping, limits and touch behaviour for you, and those are exactly the properties that decide whether your scene feels expensive or slippery. When something feels wrong and the helper is in the way, open its source: it is short, it is three.js, and reading it is faster than searching for someone with your exact symptom.