Comment by chrismorgan

You’re far too optimistic.

The pure-canvas approach is currently very bad, and most of what makes it so is fundamentally unfixable, because fixing it would require exposing unacceptable details (for privacy or functionality). I’ve written about this quite a few times on HN. A few of the things I tend to mention could conceivably be fixed, but browser-makers have shown absolutely no inclination to address any of it.

No, for at least the rest of this decade, doing things properly will absolutely require using the HTML DOM. And I’m very sceptical that browser-makers will ever seek to make the pure-canvas approach a viable alternative, there are just way too many problems with it.

If you reduce the scope to custom layout and such for CSS, there are interesting experiments in the CSS Houdini project.