the virtual dom is an observer pattern with meta information. the trigger of the render does the same thing as a statechange, he basically just hacked the lifecycle.
You would need to benchmark it to see the full implications, in the end he just removed the state/props update/life-cycle and moved the state into the DOM again.
But I agree he will loose some benefits of the Virtual DOM, but the way he approaches it it looks like he just short fused the the rendering to itself and uses kind of an actor system where change only rerenders the specific component. can be nice i would think of using http://cycle.js.org/ if I wanted a better event flow or https://vuejs.org/ if i want to get rid of the state.
j
stuff ;)