Plain Old JavaScript and the DOM

Strongly agree. JS and the DOM have come a long way in the last decade or so, and it's refreshing to be able to leverage simple solutions like the one he's suggesting.

Not everything needs to start with an all-in-one package that provides minimal-repaint templating, data binding, shared state management, component slots, hooks, directives, etc. When you do want to use one of those things, there are sometimes simple ad-hoc solutions that can work well, and often YAGNI can take one further than one thinks.

Yeah I’ve gone up and down that same curve.