Other than the historic messiness the other comment raised, the DOM API is just... not good. I don't think it's surprising developers don't want to bother with fun stuff such as

- The only way to remove a node is node.parentNode.removeChild(node), until you get past IE11 then you can use Element.remove() https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/rem...

- Text node normalization - because there are separate representation of the exact same HTML https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/normal...

- NodeLists are almost but not quite arrays. They could also be live or static but you can't inspect it directly to tell which is which https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NodeList. Similar almost-array nonsense with HTMLCollection.

- Historically IE and Netscape/Firefox supported two completely different set of API and it was a horrible mess. You can still see remnants of that API war in functions that does almost but not quite the same things such as textContent vs. innerText https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/textCo...,