Yeah, for smaller sites plain old manual DOM manipulations can work just fine. You're writing productive code right from the get go. No need to learn the nuance

Yeah, for smaller sites plain old manual DOM manipulations can work just fine. You're writing productive code right from the get go. No need to learn the nuances of a JS framework. But if the site or web app gets larger, I would want to use an SPA to eliminate manual DOM manipulations -- for both performance and maintainability reasons. jQuery still offers great utility in today's SPA world, but unfortunately the most popular JS frameworks have gone so far into developing their own domain specific languages and opaque rendering processes that most parts of jQuery can't be used with them. I wish more frameworks allowed components to be written in vanilla JS and had rendering that returned standard DomNodes.