The React world is still deep in `document.createElement` and doesn't seem to be investing in the template tag any time soon.

I don't know what your benchmarks were exactly, but my benchmarking (also primarily in firefox) shows cloning templates is much faster than `document.createElement` for many tree shapes I was encountering. (Not micro-benchmarks of one element or so at a time, but the tree contents of entire components and "pages" at a time.) That's before learning of a performance tweak I'd missed from reading this thread today (`document.importNode` for template contents cloning to avoid multiple tree walking passes to attach the clone to the document).