So you could probably describe vdom as a smart queue. How smart it is depends on the diffing and how it pushes those changes. Abstracting this from the developer. Bound to be less efficient than an expert (like an expert writing assembly vs C) but just like any other abstraction having both pros and cons.

The question is whether the abstraction is worth the potential savings in complexity (which maybe is not the case, but I sure do love coding in Elm).