We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime.
That might only make sense for applications with high levels of information density and snappy reactivity requirements like Figma or Google Docs or a web map -- not for content-focused websites. Still, it's interesting to wonder if our arguments would be more interesting these days if we were discussing those types of approaches, rather than just fighting about React vs. Svelte, or this JavaScript module loader vs. that one...
Every time I have used it, it feels incredibly laggy with a crapton of useless animations.
Maybe it's better on Windows?
Overall we're pretty minimal when it comes to animations in product (i.e. here's a quick 22s recording of navigating between screens/opening properties panels in product today: https://video.non.io/video-2940009905.mp4) as we really want to convey that the app is snappy/performant. Definitely keen on diving in if you're experiencing otherwise. Happy to chat here or my email is jake@figma.com.
Regarding platform specific performance - it shouldn't affect things as long as you have GPU acceleration enabled. The majority of us over here at Figma are using OSX FWIW.
Dragging any object is laggy--particularly so over the slightly pinkish/purplish background area.