CanvasKit still renders to canvas (maybe that's what you meant by "canvas-like", but it is still directly drawing to an HTML canvas), it just enables Flutter to utilize a more advanced feature set than the DOM canvas API. It also comes with a 2MB or so download (which is why by default it's off on mobile last I checked).
you did not understand my point, canvaskit is skia but slower, over wasm. It output to an HTML canvas and HTML canvas are immediate mode, they do not have retained mode rendering (display lists, occlusion, caching, etc).
Besides I don't think canvaskit is faster than regular HTML canvas. Even if canvaskit might avoid some compute that would normally be done at the HTML canvas level, canvaskit could implement retained mode rendering but 1) it does not 2) it would not really be appropriate because of the unstructured API (unlike DOM), 3) the final HTML canvas would still behave immediately.
As I said, it's important to realize that you are rendering skia (html canvas) on skia (canvaskit wasm) the amount of overhead and rendering duplication is in theory crazy.
