I've had this criticism many times in the past, but after doing exclusively JS rendered DOM for about 5 years now, I personally could never go back.

I write large-scale web front-ends as my day-job, they used a number of tools, but the one thing in common is the HTML-free approach. It creates much more manageable codebases, encourages reusability, allows for easy composition, and massive flexibility.

You mention that you "don't touch it" due to decades of experience. Have a look at the example app (https://github.com/KoryNunn/fastn/blob/gh-pages/example/) as an example of app structure. Yes, it's a trivial example, but it's not really that different to the non-trivial apps I build at work.

Maybe it's time to give it a go again?