[tlrobinson]

Generally I agree, however even some DOM-based implementations of spreadsheets (and similar applications with very long lists of things) break "find in page" due to them only rendering visible cells for performance reasons.

For example, Google Sheets hijacks command/control-F to show their own search for this reason.

[woogley]

Also because Google Sheets is a canvas implementation, not DOM

[lucideer]

Google Sheets is a combo. The sheet display is canvas, but a lot of interaction is DOM (and—notably—all text is initially stored in DOM, but then paged out for perf reasons as the above commenter mentions).

That said, X-Spreadsheet does also use DOM for some text interactions at least—seemingly much less so than Google from what I can initially/briefly see though.