No offense, but this sounds like typical React-cult nonsense.
You're still making the same amount of DOM manipulations in the end. And you don't need VDOM to figure out which manipulations are necessary.
There are some potential optimizations VDOM can allow (e.g. batching/deduping), but there's nothing "lightweight" about it. Lightweight overhead is still overhead.
When we started using React in 2015 it was in one of the official explanations (or semi-official, like a blog post by someone working on it). The page I remember involved comparing the number of attributes each node has in the vDOM vs the real DOM and its legacy attributes, and was about both about memory usage and how it restricts the search space by just not allowing most of those legacy attributes.
You're still making the same amount of DOM manipulations in the end. And you don't need VDOM to figure out which manipulations are necessary.
There are some potential optimizations VDOM can allow (e.g. batching/deduping), but there's nothing "lightweight" about it. Lightweight overhead is still overhead.