If your actual point is that "The virtual DOM is faster than a slow-but-common pattern of DOM mutation" then, sure. We have different experiences in how common wiping out the entire DOM really was in apps not using frameworks but differing experiences is normal.
But in a comment thread of people saying the virtual DOM is not faster than equivalent manual DOM mutations you can understand why "The virtual DOM was faster than the DOM" got understood differently since it lacked that clarification.
Well that's what React originally compared against. Sure, you could do it the manual, tedious and error-prone way to achieve similar performance, but that's not really interesting to React users.
But in a comment thread of people saying the virtual DOM is not faster than equivalent manual DOM mutations you can understand why "The virtual DOM was faster than the DOM" got understood differently since it lacked that clarification.