Yes, in my experience this can get to considerable scale (hundreds of thousands and beyond) but at a price. You need to do all your own management for things DOM/SVG were doing (e.g. hit detection, styling). You still need to send the data to the client and probably store it locally (customers will enjoy learning how to start Chrome from the command line with flags like --args --js-flags="--max_old_space_size=8192"). The client environment still doesn't have much support for data management or processing unless you bring in some other JS libraries. I'm a big fan of JS development but the criticism is on target.
DOM-nodes are rather heavy compared to simple JS objects, so getting rid of them can bring some visualizations that are too heavy for the browser back into the realm of doable.
After that you have to optimize your other data-structures. If you have objects with many boolean fields or strings that are essentially used as enums, you can try to replace them with bit-fields, I read some library creators (BlueBird promise) got much performance gains with them.
