[austin-cheney]

You are still thinking in terms of framework goodness, which is why this is challenging for you. Don't do that. Don't redraw anything. Don't create some shallow copy, cloned node, or other insanity. You don't need any of that. You don't need to litter your code, most especially your DOM nodes, with a bunch of business logic insanity.

All you need is the event handler. The event handler can be assigned to a node's event property directly, but if this is for a commercial site with lots of third party analytics/spyware you need to use a event listener instead because those third party libraries will overwrite your event assignments. The event handler receives an event object as an argument with a reference back to the given DOM node.

All the business logic should be stored in a single location representing a given business function, typically far away from the browser logic. It makes sense when you write the code without using a framework. If you write the code and try to make it look like a framework it will look like a framework, unsurprisingly. If you don't do a bunch of framework component insanity it will not look like a framework.

This is a person problem, not a technology problem.

[rrgok]

I did not understand the event handler part. Could you make an example?

[austin-cheney]

    const myHandler = function (event) {
        console.log(event.target);
    };
    
    // this is simple and easier to troubleshoot,
    // but you can only directly assign one value to an object property
    myNode.onclick = myHandler;
    
    // for pages with JavaScript code from third party domains
    // use event listeners instead
    myNode.addEventListener("click", myHandler);

When leaving frameworks you have to stop thinking in terms of components, isolated code islands that exist only in their own isolated world. Instead think of areas of the page as parts of a larger whole. You can manage each part independently or not. You wouldn't program outside the browser using something like React, so your programming inside the browser should reflect how you would build an application if the browser weren't there.