Is there another way? I've only done WebGL, so not familiar with Vulkan/Metal/DirectX/etc. - but in my experience you're clearing the screen and re-drawing everything every tick no matter what. If only for applying post-processing effects.

Updating buffers is of course a totally separate thing, and on that side I don't think anyone updates everything every tick, usually there's some sort of scene graph that knows about dirty transforms and their children, so only those get updated..