You'd want to benchmark this yourself, and assume that the impact will probably decrease as browsers progress, but I believe that for very large trees (tables,

You'd want to benchmark this yourself, and assume that the impact will probably decrease as browsers progress, but I believe that for very large trees (tables, etc) it can have a fair impact. That said, I'm guessing paints aren't what are usually slowing your page down. A quick way to validate that is to open up the devtools and run a performance trace. Watch for paint events vs JS code execution and such.