I think manual DOM manipulation and lack of canonical state representation are both sources of spaghetti code; which one hurts more depends on the type of app y

I think manual DOM manipulation and lack of canonical state representation are both sources of spaghetti code; which one hurts more depends on the type of app you're building. Having the DOM as your canonical representation of state is only suitable for apps with limited state IMO, because your state effectively has to be turned into text (CSS class names and element attributes) whenever it is mutated, which becomes a liability as the complexity of your app state grows.