Just want to ask, because I love talking about render performance: have you tried doing this using offfscreen canvas? That should allow you to move a lot of things to a worker, so you avoid blocking the rendering with js? It probably won’t speed up the total time to finished render, but I assume it will lock the page for a shorter period of time?
If the rendering is this controlled (and sparse), blocking the thread with it isn't really a concern. And with this data size, serialization/deserialization between the main and worker thread would probably become nontrivial.
We offer some support for the previous version of the spec. In those cases you can add a media query to detect IE10+ and override some of the properties. It works well as a starting point for supporting the legacy grid. In our tests the positioning is working as expected, but the sizing units might need some tweaks.
For me the biggest issue with IE grid is the lack of support for auto-positioning of elements. If you don't rely on that for your design you can support IE10+ pretty well.