Obviously diffing is going to have some overhead. But this overhead is minimal in most use-cases. The benchmark in this article is not a real use-case. If you

Obviously diffing is going to have some overhead. But this overhead is minimal in most use-cases. The benchmark in this article is not a real use-case. If you wanna show 1200 images in a web page, or 1200 elements of any kind in one web page, then you should only create DOM elements for those of them that should actually be visible by the user. You read the scroll position and calculate which ones would be visible in the viewport, create DOM elements for those, and disregard the rest. In most real-world applications, this technique would suffice. Your DOM and vDOM would be small, and you'd only be diffing maybe 5-10 elements at a time. Although, I can think of use-cases where this technique, and React's style of coding may not be sufficient. One example is iOS's Photos app. Sometimes it animates hundreds of elements at a time (where you're viewing photos by year or location). I guess diffing might not be a fast enough solution for this use-case.