I guess it truly does come down to preference and perception, as looking over that link you provided I actually had the opposite reaction!

I prefer the DOM API in each example, save for examples that are clearly out of date to support old versions of IE without a polyfill (e.g. all the AJAX examples at the top can use fetch, other can use Object.assign, no use of the iterator interface anywhere, etc)

This is something I really can't fathom.

It takes twice as much typing without the chainable, unix pipe like API. I really don't get it, but I've been baffled by this industry's decision for more than a decade.