I believe you’ve misunderstood my intent. When I speak of the pure canvas approach, I mean throwing away almost all that the browser gives you, and rendering everything in a single canvas, with fake scrolling, fake links, &c.

For individual widgets like data visualisation, go ahead, use canvas if you want; I won’t complain—though make sure if you have any links in it that you have actual <a> links on top of the canvas for the user to interact with. And also consider if you can SVG. Anyway, individual canvases are fine; but don’t put everything in a single canvas.

Things like Google Docs and Figma are often cited as examples of how canvas-based rendering can be not bad, but neither are pure canvas: the user interface of both is full DOM, and it’s only the document area that’s canvas. (Also, I find Google Docs somewhat unpleasant: its rendering latency and throughput while you type is terrible, and keyboard caret navigation doesn’t match my platform’s behaviour in many places.)

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33863185 (similar content to this comment).