I looked into the code linked elsewhere in the thread and then just watched the behavior in the browser dev tools.

Delete the entire thing, recreate, delete the entire thing, recreate. That's as far as the amazing web standards will take you.

As soon as you start talking reactive, dom diffing, and keyed rows, you're literally in the territory of the frameworks you so love to berate.

Frameworks, especially modern ones, do all that and so much more (and leverage web standards whenever possible if those give an advantage)