Hey Bret,
Nice article, although not sure I entirely agree with some parts. The “problems” you list here with vanilla HTML are probably tasks should be handled outside of HTML to begin with (in adherence to separation of concerns). DOM events, dynamic data insertion, loops, conditional logic — all of these seem to me to be JavaScript stuff.
While I agree that templating systems can make writing markup quicker and cleaner (I’m a HUGE fan of Markdown myself), I think the real problem with vanilla HTML is that developers don’t take the time to actually learn how to use it properly in the first place.