I appreciate the helpful reply, but I think this is precisely the kind of indirection I need to avoid. I'm a sucker for elegance. If left entirely to my own devices I'd probably design a language / write a transpiler of my own, and wind up with exceedingly elegant tooling for websites, and no websites. :)

This is why I don't use Typescript or frameworks in my own projects, I just constantly seek the cleanest abstraction and never get anything done. Using a deliberately messy solution is annoying but at least I accomplish stuff.