The best part about React is declarative rendering, you tell React what the DOM should look like, it makes it so. React does this using a virtual representation

The best part about React is declarative rendering, you tell React what the DOM should look like, it makes it so. React does this using a virtual representation of the DOM, but this is an implementation detail. If you can do declarative rendering without keeping a virtual representation of the DOM and diffing it against the real DOM then "the virtual DOM is overhead" (https://svelte.dev/blog/virtual-dom-is-pure-overhead https://svelte.dev/blog/virtual-dom-is-pure-overhead).