The chain of reasoning is wonderfully put, but DOM manipulation was definitely a problem. When elements are inserted or removed from lists, you'd have to do a d

The chain of reasoning is wonderfully put, but DOM manipulation was definitely a problem. When elements are inserted or removed from lists, you'd have to do a dance of many jQuery() steps. There is no concept of state, it is all tangled up in DOM values, and the most elegant solution was to use $.serialize() if it works in that context. This mess was why people hated front-end programming. It has only been a year or two since Angular/React became mainstream and allowed us to think of state as plain JS objects. Lest we forget, it was truly bad times before.