Google was first with a decent SVG and they were leapfrogged. But Chrome is the most used browser, and together with Safari, WebKit leads big time over the shrinking IE and FF portion. I and my clients can't afford to do entirely different things per browser.

My area of data visualization involves e.g. time series, where a decent zoom/pan implementation and a few years of stock or weather data means that you're juggling DOM elements in and out to keep frame rate, but adding/removing DOM elements revolver style is even more expensive, introducing janks. I also tend to work on exploratory vis where it's useful to scatter all points, tween them (not as a gratuitous effect but for object constancy, to help the user keep context) etc.

Interestingly it's also Google who wants you to get minimal with payload size. Yet it's OK for them if you roll your own speedy version of SVG by bundling a 100k of three.js or make your own text rasterizer, essentially reimplementing browser functionality.