You can use document.createElement and document.appendChild to create every last <th>, <tr>, and <td> if you want. Those functions are not specific to tables, unlike the one mentioned in the blog post. They can be used to create any elements and place them in the DOM. But if you know what you are doing you can get a perfectly fine table out of that. (Not that you should.)
Yeah, that was what I was thinking of. I knew those as the essential APIs to modify the DOM without a full re-parse. And you can use them on table/th/tr/td nodes just like on any other node.