That doesn't actually answer the question, nor does it even seem relevant... since as much as I just hated on jQuery it DOES provide some methods for at least SOME of it -- append, prepend, before, after, text, the ENTIRE "tree traversal" method set -- it's just it feels like nobody uses them and instead defaults to using the most convoluted and insecure methodology possible.
... and at the HTML/JS level this isn't "low level" ANYTHING! Unless by that you mean the minimum basics that should be followed if you care about accessibility, usability, speed, efficiency, and actually working smarter instead of harder.
Since to be brutally frank, 99% of the time I bump heads with this it's because of an XSS exploit or the entire website it is on flipping the bird at accessibility which is why the client ends up being fined or facing civil lawsuits over the failings! aka what I specialize in helping clients out of.
It just feels like the whole mess is either outright ignorance, or willful negligence...
More so when the result is people crapping together megabytes of JavaScript on websites that shouldn't even HAVE scripting on them in the first bloody place -- at least not for what they are actually doing with it.
It literally ends up feeling like people are saying that starting out with more code to write more code of their own resulting in 100 times the code actually needed to do the job is "simpler". That's some special kool-aid being handed out there...