i agree on the whole that query is a good second line of defense versus the primary strategy. however you can do query based strategy and still use a diff/patch approach for some queries, just make the previous state of a query one of its inputs.

query based compilers are equivalent to component UI frameworks / signals / self-adjusting computation / spreadsheets. signia signals library implements this idea of using the previous output + diffs to compute the next output (https://signia.tldraw.dev/docs/incremental#using-diffs-in-co...)