Reference checks are conservative in spotting unchanged areas (if true, definitely no change, if false, maybe no change) unless all values are internalized (a bit expensive to do that). Also, diffing is only needed at all when you need to compare values anyways; dirty bits are otherwise sufficient to mark changes.

I'm not really familiar with the web ecosystem, but why would it differ so much from say C#/WPF? or a system based on change propagation instead of diffing?