You are correct, but if you think about it, you're talking about parsing and tokenizing before the operation can even occur. That's really heavy. I think it could be better than reading .innerHTML

> Document fragments are like transactions for the DOM.

About the same way innerHTML is which is completely unhelpful: during reconciliation you need to copy, update, and reset the subtree which contains all the update points, which is almost certainly a lot more than you need.

You also likely need to reconcile document state (e.g. focus) by hand.