Well... faster than what exactly? You have to do the virtual DOM pattern (generating new DOM state and then diffing with old state) with virtual elements. You can't compare proper virtual dom to using real DOM elements instead of virtual ones in a virtual dom pattern, it wouldn't make any sense.

But there are other non-virtual-DOM ways to manage DOM state efficiently and in a maintainable manner. For example, my own library uses Observables to drive precise DOM updates and works with trees holding real (not virtual) DOM elements, so it doesn't need to do any diffing at all: https://github.com/raquo/Laminar

I don't think it's a given which of these techniques would be faster, it depends heavily on the particular use case and the implementation of diffing (for virtual DOM) and Observables (for my pattern). If both are well optimized I'd expect virtual DOM to lose in a lot of cases.