It is not for small changes. But as soon has you update a whole layout of many listings, I doubt you are manually diffing your nested data structure to produce

It is not for small changes. But as soon has you update a whole layout of many listings, I doubt you are manually diffing your nested data structure to produce the less possible updates. React also uses a couple of other tricks, like attaching one event handler to the top of the DOM doc and fire fake events (they call it synthetic) to avoid having many handlers in the page. Or queueing udpates and merging them so that if many updates arrive at a very close time, you update only the DOM once. Vue.js and Angular 2 do the same. Although Vue.js is my favorite right now because it's so much more flexible and easier to use.