Agreed. Up until recently, I too used to prefer working with raw HTML... then I started working on a couple large apps, tried polymer/angular, and ended up gaining a new-found appreciation for frameworks like react/mithril/mercury.
The cost of abstracting away the DOM isn't as much as I would've expected compared to the cognitive overhead of switching back and forth between languages, making sure everything is linked up nicely, as you normally would. There are a few times when that abstraction can lead to annoying hidden bugs, but overall I've found the workflow to be much nicer.
The cost of abstracting away the DOM isn't as much as I would've expected compared to the cognitive overhead of switching back and forth between languages, making sure everything is linked up nicely, as you normally would. There are a few times when that abstraction can lead to annoying hidden bugs, but overall I've found the workflow to be much nicer.