> Then the industry started figuring out that the virtual DOM was kind of a scam from a performance standpoint

Could you elaborate?

Not a frontend guy but my understanding was that the virtual DOM is what's necessary to enable a simplified model where you can code as if your entire view was rerendered from scratch when there's a change.

Mutating the DOM only where and when you need to in a handcrafted fashion is always going to be faster, it's just not scalable, I guess.

So, in that context the virtual DOM is not really a scam. Not sure in what sense it is? Was it claimed to be performing better than it does?