I think that hits the real problem: it’s staffing and culture, not the tool. The 90th percentile site using a vDOM is also a perf nightmare, especially for anyone who doesn’t have a recent Apple device on a fast network, and that often has big impacts on usability and accessibility as well (dynamic loading sucks on screen readers unless you put way more time into it that most people do).

I was painfully reminded of that while visiting Europe last month on a data plan which was clearly deprioritized on partner networks - the old sites with .php in the URLs loaded in a few seconds and worked perfectly, but every time something failed to load in less than 5 minutes or partially loaded but didn’t work a quick trip over to webpagetest.org showed a lot of NextJS, React, et al. scripts trickling in because clearly a form with half a dozen fields needs 25MB of JavaScript.

The root cause is obvious: you get what you measure. If businesses prioritize Jira tickets closed per day, they’re going to get this soup of things promising to be easy to use for high developer velocity and they’re never going to get around to the optimizing it. If they’re trying to be able to hire as cheaply as possible, they’re going to look for the current tool boot camps are pushing and hire based on that, not looking for deeper knowledge of web standards or experience which costs more and shrink the candidate pool. If they’re looking for a safe choice, Facebook’s marketing means all of the big consulting companies will push React and few people will pause long enough to ask whether they’re building the same kind of apps it was designed to build (long session times, tons of local state being mutated, etc.) or whether they’re willing to invest the time needed to get it to perform reliably and well.

There are more and more frameworks that avoid the VDOM but still resolve this fine. As long as DOM mutation is handled by the framework (and not done ad-hoc), and as long as the framework has a mechanism for deferring those mutations until after all reads, then there shouldn't be a problem. This is the approach taken by SolidJS, Svelte, and even the new rendering model for VueJS.

In all these frameworks, mutations happen inside effects, and effects are scheduled such that they all happen at the end of the tick, avoiding reflows and thrashing.