I really like working with DOM since that's all you're ever guaranteed to have access to - even if there is a virtual DOM putting a site together, you may not have the access you need to add to that in the right way. For that reason I prefer to stick with abstractions that can run on regular DOM and hope that if I'm in a situation where I can make use of a virtual DOM, my code will be flexible enough to work there too, but I don't know how many virtual DOM plugins and code can work on regular DOM if you needed to use them outside of that one particular workflow.