I'd be curious to see the performance differences between this drawing on 2d canvas, webgl and similar code in plain JS. Mostly curious at that webgl benchmark
From my gut, I'd say that the WebGL renderer is fast at rendering lots of shapes with only translation / rotation transformations applied to them. SVG is highly optimized on Webkit and handles shape morphing really well and so the SVG renderer handles that really well. Canvas sits somewhere in between the two.