There's downsides with every approach though. While taking a "render HTML and manipulate DOM" approach falls down hard when the DOM mutations become frequent or complicated enough that they take a performance toll, the alternative most commonly peddled, "ship JSON and let the client render everything" has increased in massively increased JS bundle sizes and horrendous initial load performance on many sites.

I suppose there's the alternative of "ship HTML and forget about Javascript for the most part", but very, very few people are following that nowadays, and besides which, JQuery supports a "Javascript not required" progressive enhancement model far far more than most other front-end frameworks.