What is the point? Optimizing for lines of code is a wasteful target. I thought we all knew that by now? Great that you can demonstrate that you can do something without React where others are using React, but that's not the point at all.
If you do more than a few asynchronous calls you will quickly find yourself developing your own DOM abstraction. That's a waste of time because React and Vue already exist, and have existed for years, and are battle tested.
SPA frameworks also give you the ability to write your applications in a declarative way, which is _far_ easier and way less error prone, thus easier to test, than imperative DOM modifications.
