What you're talking about is called "implicit key matching" in React-speak. AFAIK it isn't implemented as a transposition, rather an "insert before" because the

What you're talking about is called "implicit key matching" in React-speak. AFAIK it isn't implemented as a transposition, rather an "insert before" because the DOM API supports it directly. I have written a VDOM algorithm that relies only on swaps, deletions and insertions, but it doesn't map well to the DOM API.