Thanks for the feedback! There were so many rabbit holes that I had to prevent myself going down - I scope creeped this article enough as it is!

I also specifically didn't want to go into the data join patterns for two main reasons:

1. there are lots of other articles that talk about it in depth, and 2. these days, I largely don't use it at all.

This is partially why I wanted to write this up, because the DOM manipulation parts can seem like an integral part of D3, but there are really only 2 modules devoted to it. I mostly use D3 for its utility methods, and a JS framework like React to handle all of the rendering, and I really want other people to be able to discover those functions without first "learning d3".