This is good. Many frameworks are just too freaking huge for mobile but even when you use tiny frameworks and you dump a bunch of images into them you're going to have similar issues (at least on load).

Honestly using the DOM API isn't all that hard. Yes it awkward, verbose and sometimes cumbersome but it's still pretty straight forward. I'm actually really liking react lately but if I want something done well for a mobile I almost never use a framework.

Another thing this article didn't touch on was latency. When I was doing work for vehicles that had poor internet access via satellite every single http call just killed the load (this included fetching css, javascript, etc). I can't stress enough how much better your page can load if you combine as much stuff as possible, even images if you can display them as backgrounds.