[Mavvie]

I don't think so. I believe it's because without a virtual DOM and a diff, how would react do rendering at all? The whole point of react is you just have a functional "render" method, so you need to render _somewhere_ (and it can't be the DOM for a variety of reasons, eg. deleting and rebuilding the whole DOM would be slow and break things like focus).

Svelte is different and doesn't export a render function -- the component knows what DOM nodes need to change for a given prop/reactive var change, so it doesn't need a virtual DOM (and can be much faster as a result)