Ask HN: Are there any React compiler projects to avoid needing the runtime?

Frameworks like Svelte and Solidjs do their work at compile time to produce an application that requires minimal runtime framework code. Why can't the same be done for existing React code? I would imagine that a good portion of React components aren't dependent on behavior specific to the virtual DOM and could be compiled to functionally equivalent vanilla JS that doesn't require the virtual DOM.

I wouldn't think that there could be a seamless switchover from React to whatever this compile-time framework would be, but I can't see why it wouldn't be possible for that to be done with only minimal effort to adapt the source code.