One of the reasons the virtual DOM exists is because it really tries to get around the browser limitations on DOM rendering. We were also all trying to manage templates and data binding. If you remove these three things, most of us could architect very simple JS apps with a singleton object.
It’s as soon as you need to define the dynamic template structure, bind data to it, and do everything in a browser performant way, is when we started trading away the simplicity for off the shelf complexity that solves mostly these three problems.
I've gotten by using a templating engine like Handlebars along with jQuery for async behavior for pretty much all of my apps. Reduced the time I spent building UIs a huge amount.
There are actually very few websites that 'require' an app-in-browser experience. And for many of those, clever usage of jQuery plugins works well enough.
