> what most people actually would need is Chrome's experimental declarative partial updates
No, nobody needs any more "experimental" Chrome bullshit.
The use case you mention, scrollable lists of static contents, works perfectly fine with DOM manipulation and virtualization, if you have a lot of content. Sure, maybe you can speed it up a bit with string manipulation (good luck not introducing XSS) but if you have so much content that this is a noticable factor, you probably want virtualization anyway.