It’s not that tedious. Learning to do it properly takes less effort than learning a major framework. You would actually have to do it and learn it for this to make any sense though.
I tried both approaches on a recent project and in my experience it gets tedious once my application (and with it, its rendering logic) got more complicated. Manually juggling around listeners and mutable state all over the place just leaves a lot of room for error. (As opposed to leaving all that to some DOM reconciler that I don't have to, essentially, implement myself for every problem.)
Initially learning a new paradigm (declarative over imperative in this case) is hard, of course, but it can be worthwhile. Whatever works for you though.
