In React, each of our components have a state. This state is like an observable. Essentially, React knows when to re-render the scene because it is able to observe when this data changes. Dirty checking is slower than observables because we must poll the data at a regular interval and check all of the values in the data structure recursively. By comparison, setting a value on the state will signal to a listener that some state has changed, so React can simply listen for change events on the state and queue up re-rendering.
The virtual DOM is used for efficient re-rendering of the DOM. This isn’t really related to dirty checking your data. We could re-render using a virtual DOM with or without dirty checking. In fact, the diff algorithm is a dirty checker itself.
