The time is right for a DOM templating API

Is there anyone else who feels kinda like declarative templating is actually kind of worse than jQuery? Don't get me wrong, I've been using React for nearly a decade. But the more complex my SPAs become, the more I wish I had imperative control of the DOM.

I think the reason is because the DOM is a leaky abstraction and at some level I would just prefer last write wins.

I realize declarative templating is supposed to handle that, but this starts to break down really quickly when you share mutable state between components.