In my past job, we rewrote our spreadsheet rendering to use canvas and gained massively in simplicity and maintainability. And there was no obfuscation angle to it - we even shipped source maps! Handling accessibility and text input was hard (we ended up adopting a hybrid-DOM model where some things like input fields were still native ones, or shadowed by native ones), and even then it was still easier than dealing with browser rendering.
This is simply a reasonable way to work around the DOM being trash. The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution.