This really just isn't true. If your state updates are at the component subtree level (like react) a vdom is a good choice. But, if you make your state changes more granular, you can get away with skipping VDOM entirely and work with just* regular dom nodes. Look at Solid or Svelte. No VDOM there, just pure granular updates.
*List reconciliation still has to happen, but you don't need to pull out an entire vdom. You just have to have some mapping between list items and their resulting DOM nodes.
TBF while Solid and Svelte don't use a VDOM on which they perform diffing, they still ultimately create a tree parallel to the DOM which is used to track dependencies.
*List reconciliation still has to happen, but you don't need to pull out an entire vdom. You just have to have some mapping between list items and their resulting DOM nodes.