Virtual DOM in any scenario will always be slower than updating the DOM directly. The virtual DOM will always be overhead. The issue is if you are manually updating the DOM yourself you can easily shoot yourself in the foot by doing so in a way that is less performant, or breaks things like scroll position, focus management etc. Its also normally more tedious to do manually. This is where the virtual DOM came in. You just declaratively update the JSX and it handles the updating itself.

But nowadays there are plenty of solutions that do not use virtual DOM (or even use a virtual DOM solution that is just plain faster) but still allow you to use declarative rendering, basically the best of both worlds. They are just not as popular or for some people not as interesting to them as React is. Or they are content with Reacts performance already.