Hey mate. I have used Handlebar as a client side templating in one of my side project. I was banging my head once. Then templating has helped me a lot during DOM Manipulation.
I think without templating we cannot make our DOM manipulation easily, but still we can make it. Whatever application you build DOM manipulation will takes place.
If you prefer to go with any frameworks or library, they will have their own templating. For example Django a python's web framework has their own template language.
So I hope everyone will use templating.