Your understanding is correct. Virtual DOM never promised better performance than pre-rendered static HTML. It only achieves better performance (and better UX)

Your understanding is correct. Virtual DOM never promised better performance than pre-rendered static HTML. It only achieves better performance (and better UX) than dumbly re-rendering the whole website whenever the underlying data changes. The reason people are doing SSR with modern JS-frameworks is quite simple: some kinds of content aren't a good fit for SPAs (or maybe there are other constraints that favour rendering it all in the server), but it might still be desirable to use modern JS-frameworks. For example: you wouldn't implement a blog as an SPA, but it might still be desirable to use React to render everything.