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My goal isn’t to devolve into a discussion about reactive framework performance. My core question is, “Is there a non-reactive layer that we can jump into, similar to the render object layer in Flutter?”

So I’ve made some assumptions about compose based on what I’ve learned from other reactive frameworks.

Is compose in fact maintaining a shadow dom tree behind the scenes that it uses to determine whether or not changes to the UI have happened?

Not really, no, we do not use a VDOM in the same sense as something like React or Flutter.  That was one the mistakes we made back when my old team was building React.js and one which I pushed very very hard to avoid in Compose (ie. allocations).  That's one of the reasons we are a compiler plugin instead of a runtime library.

Idk if compose is suitable for game _rendering_, but compose is great for managing trees of objects in general (core compose has nothing to do with ui or graphics). If your game uses a tree of entities, scene graph, etc, you could use compose to write your game logic and still use a different rendering engine to actually draw the pixels.