I'm going to call shenanigans on this. I've worked on dozens of applications (my own and others) with hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of DOM nodes. I'

I'm going to call shenanigans on this. I've worked on dozens of applications (my own and others) with hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of DOM nodes. I've never seen a problem like this. React simply doesn't rerender things that you don't tell it to. It's easy to try to do something clever and have it cause unnecessary (and expensive) rerenders, but that's not the fault of React internals being slow, it's the fault of the userspace code doing more work than it needs to. Of course the profiler shows the time is spent inside React, it's doing all the work your code told it to do. React also gives you great tools to avoid and remediate this (memoization wrappers, the dev tools highlight elements that rerender, linters that check you're using hooks correctly), so it's really hard to say that this is a slowness that's endemic to the vdom.