D3 does not provide an object model over canvas (similar to paper.js). But you can render your output to canvas through custom renderers and bind them to datasets through d3.

This is illustrated very well by this example that uses both canvas and SVG.

Apart from custom rendering logic as in above there are other approaches towards using using canvas eg. by rendering svg (generated through d3) on canvas through javascript based svg renderers.

The support that you have found in documentation mostly refers to utilities for zooming and panning etc. (d3-zoom) which are very useful for interactive visualizations, and utilities to serialize canvas path commands to svg.

Using canvas can be helpful when the DOM involved in visualization is very complex. This article highlights some interesting use cases.

D3 is agnostic about the media that you render the data on. As a rule of thumb

• canvas degrades with the amount of pixels.
• Svg objects inherit from Event --> Node --> Element-->SVGElement, therefore their performance will degrade NOT by size, but the number of elements (DOM nodes) drawn.

If you want easy interactivity (out of the box since these are DOM nodes) + nifty rendering quality go for SVG.

If you want nifty animation that updates many particles, for canvas