What’s difficult isn’t the DOM itself, it’s that you thread in and out of the DOM with a changing DOM state and with multiple people writing application code. M

What’s difficult isn’t the DOM itself, it’s that you thread in and out of the DOM with a changing DOM state and with multiple people writing application code. Many of the frameworks / packagers exist to help tame the context switching, since in frontend land you might have business logic that is dependent on a CSS class that may or may not be present at any given moment and might be modified by some other piece of logic. Everything in the DOM is basically a global variable, and any part of the app might manipulate any part of the DOM. Example: Someone wrote CSS that is coupled to a child element (which seemed the clearest way to write it at the time) and someone else comes along to edit the content of the HTML which adds a layer and now your logic is broken even if the CSS still looks right. The frameworks make it easier to avoid that kind of fragile coupling / enforce a consistent way to manage the interaction of JS, CSS, and HTML. All that said, web applications really are an entirely different beast than websites, even if they exist on a spectrum.