Controlling DOM updates yourself will always allow for best performance.
Virtual DOM still needs to reconcile and apply DOM updates, but since this is handled by your UI framework of choice you have limited ability to optimize these updates.
I would argue that if performance is your top concern you'd still be better off using a framework like SolidJS, but theoretically JavaScript and JQuery can be better optimized.
Are we seeing the same benchmark? On that site, both Vue and Svelte are extremely close/on-par with Vanilla JS on every benchmark except the transfer size and first paint (which shouldn't matter at all here). jQuery also has an overhead, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's larger on many benchmarks than, say, Svelte's.
Yes, modern frameworks are getting very good. This does not change the fact that abstractions around DOM updates (frameworks) limits your ability to maximally optimize performance. The output of frameworks is still vanilla js.
Virtual DOM still needs to reconcile and apply DOM updates, but since this is handled by your UI framework of choice you have limited ability to optimize these updates.
See benchmarks: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...
I would argue that if performance is your top concern you'd still be better off using a framework like SolidJS, but theoretically JavaScript and JQuery can be better optimized.