I don't get it why you need direct DOM access. Just wrap it in JS calls.
It's not like current websites are super fast and creating a wrapper will slow it down unnecessarily.
The article cites the research that JS wrapping of DOM calls slows things down by 50%.
Just to be clear: It slows down the overhead of a function call by 50%. It doesn't slow down the function implementation which takes a very large percentage of the time.