The VDOM library will still need to manipulate the real DOM sooner or later, so the proposed performance boost of this abstraction is not relevant for browsers.

Since the VDOM runs fast in Node, you can execute your tests quickly in Jest. But since no real browser are running on Node, the value of this is perhaps questionable.

The browser can get a performance boost via serverside rendering and again it comes in handy that the VDOM runs fast in Node. But perhaps this solves a problem that the VDOM has caused, because React loads slowly and renders the slowest [1].

You can run the VDOM in Android and on iOS via React Native and this is all well, but the VDOM is holding the web back because we have come to expect all this from technologies such as Web Components that might load fast and render fast by virtue of not relying on it.

The virtual DOM is modelling the DOM, but the DOM comes with a model out of the box, it's called the Document Object Model and it is always in sync with the view without any constant performance tweaks. Asynchronous rendering can fix it until batched rendering solves it for good. But these are opposite rendering strategies! We are simply going in circles now.

A lot of the myths around the virtual DOM can be explained by unwillingness to learn the native API and we are mostly dealing with the fallout now. It's the same with CSS. Sorry for the rant and the abuse of your comment.

[1] https://twitter.com/championswimmer/status/14865018568345845...