Agreed. Up until recently, I too used to prefer working with raw HTML... then I started working on a couple large apps, tried polymer/angular, and ended up gaining a new-found appreciation for frameworks like react/mithril/mercury.

The cost of abstracting away the DOM isn't as much as I would've expected compared to the cognitive overhead of switching back and forth between languages, making sure everything is linked up nicely, as you normally would. There are a few times when that abstraction can lead to annoying hidden bugs, but overall I've found the workflow to be much nicer.