How is the vdom novel? Any retention mode GUI does that, hell the DOM itself does that. It’s only novel in that they reimplemented it in “user-land”, because of the performance shortcoming of the DOM.
When the complex reality of JS applications was reached in React, React shortcoming became more and more apparent.
There's no free lunch.
The easier to mentally digest appeal of 'redraw the whole thing every-time'* was fantastic but performance was always going to take a massive hit past an easily reached point.
* The difference this time was the diff engine was going to be smarter than before but it was not good enough.