Everything is possible but it’s work. I’m not planning on rewriting d3-axis to be DOM-agnostic (especially because d3-axis also supports transitions). As the tutorial shows, you can use d3-axis with Observable’s hypertext literal without selections because you’re allowed to embed arbitrary DOM elements in expressions. There are ways to inject arbitrary DOM content when using Vue or React, too, but perhaps not as convenient as hypertext literal.
A custom directive in a Vue template[0], is quite similar to your example with an inline expression in an hypertext literal. Maybe a little less elegant.
But d3.select is still needed to select the bound dom element ;-)
