> because those standardized APIs will stay with us for much longer than they will be useful, wasting everyone's time.

Oh wow. You just described the existing imperative DOM APIs, haven't you? Inflexible implementation wasting everyone's time. When is the last time you used actual DOM APIs? The story of web development has been: "JFC, these things are impossible to work with, let's waste time creating actual useful abstractions on top of them".

> it's a popular concept with good library implementations. We don't need to reimplement it in all major browsers because we already have it working well.

You know what one of the goals of jQuery was? To become a disappearing library. As browser APIs got better and better, the need for jQuery would diminish and it would disappear, becoming just a browser API.

Why would browsers implement querySelector and querySelectorAll? We already had it in jQuery and it was working well.

Why would browsers implement fetch? We already had jQuery.ajax, axios, superfetch and dozens of others, and they were working well.

Why would browsers implement <insert any improvement>? We already have <insert doezns of libraries> and they are working well.

> it is easier to build one library than implement the same spec in all major browsers.

It doesn't mean we should freeze the spec in the same state it was in 1998.

> The concepts of Components, State, Context, Thunks, Fibers, Plugins, etc. are very important differentiators between various virtual DOM APIs.

None of those refer to actual APIs. Those are parts of internal implementations or additional implementations/additions/APIs on top of virtual dom.

We are talking about one thing specifically: we need a browser-native declarative DOM API with browser-native DOM-diffing that wouldn't require us implement it in userland.

The rest like thunks, state management, plugins, whatever can be provided by actual libraries on top of actual built-in high performant built-in virtual-dom API.

Because the browser knows infinitely more about what's happening to the DOM than userland libraries and has access to infinitely more optimisations. All userland code needs to do is to tell the browser: this and that changed.

Funnily enough, browser implementors are now spending considerable amounts of time implementing CSS Containment [1] (emphasis mine):

--- quote ---

Browser engines can use that information to implement optimizations and avoid doing extra work when they know which subtrees are independent of the rest of the page.

Imagine that you have a big HTML page which generates a complex DOM tree, but you know that some parts of that page are totally independent of the rest of the page and the content in those parts is modified at some point.

Browser engines usually try to avoid doing more work than needed and use some heuristics to avoid spending more time than required. However there are lots of corner cases and complex situations in which the browser needs to actually recompute the whole webpage.

--- end quote ---

Wow. Browsers (and browser implementors) actually want the developers to tell them what exactly changes on the page so that they don't do extra work. And wow, you can actually implement the same spec in all major browsers (eventually).

So why not virtual DOM?

> this whole standardization and reimplementation exercise will be rendered a giant waste of time.

So what you're saying is essentially this: new things are hype, DOM APIs should never get updated because who cares about the needs of developers.

[1] https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2019/01/11/an-introduction-to...