True, but the culprit is still DOM calls being expensive. Virtual DOM minimizes those calls through various optimizations, including not destroying elements unn

True, but the culprit is still DOM calls being expensive. Virtual DOM minimizes those calls through various optimizations, including not destroying elements unnecessarily as you said, but it's not limited to it. Consider the following scenario. You have two handlers on an event that both change the DOM and may result in cancelling each other. With the "raw" DOM you'll end up calling DOM at least twice (and changing it twice if no debouncing is used), whereas Virtual DOM both times calls to, well, its "virtual" DOM (which is a lot cheaper) and by the time it gets to its next cycle of updating the "real" DOM it may not need to change anything or do it once. These optimizations are hard to implement without resorting to a virtual DOM of one sort or another.