As far as I remember, in some cases yes. I remember when it initially launched, the typical demo was a list of 10K items or something, and the speaker (maybe Pete Hunt?) demonstrated the amount of time it took to add/remove items from that list, and how without the Virtual DOM, there was a lot of trashing (or something), and with the vdom, things got a lot faster.

I think this was back in 2013-2014 sometime though, so I might be misremembering, it's over a decade ago after all.

Backbone.js, Knockout.js, Ember, Dojo, Prototype, YUI all were reasonable alternatives at the time. Although all with their own warts and highlights, as is tradition.