It seems like the article is trying to jump on the band-wagon of bashing frameworks and then goes on to compare them to the task of DOM manipulation. People don’t learn frameworks as easier alternative to manipulate the DOM. They learn them to solve much bigger problems like application architecture, data flow, build pipeline, community conventions, etc and these concepts are very similar regardless of the framework. You might be able to pick fight with React since it was intended to solve the view layer part of the application, but Ember and Angular 2 certainly not since they have become ecosystems.