That’s totally valid — if you’re comfortable living close to the DOM, zero-runtime + zero-build is the purest path.

dagger.js is meant for folks who want to stay mostly in plain HTML/JS but still smooth out a few of those DOM “sharp edges” — e.g. inline state with +load, simple event handlers with +click, template interpolation. The idea is to reduce boilerplate without hiding what’s really happening underneath.

So it’s less about abstracting away the DOM entirely, and more about lowering the friction for small tools/demos where you don’t want to write a ton of document.createElement calls.