I disagree, but maybe it is a cultural thing for those of us that are more used to functional styles of programming? I was taught method chaining as a style by a seasoned JavaScript and Ruby programmer myself and I do not find the semantics confusing. "Create X with Y set to 17 and Z to 4711" can be either on one or three lines to me, as long as the method calls are clear and short enough.
As for variables, I (again personally) find it taxing to have many variables in scope, so I do net see their presence as a universal good. If we instead simply use expressions, then there is no need to concern yourself with whether the variable will come into play later on. Thus, I think it increases clarity and favour that over the ease of future modification argument you propose (heck, I would argue that you get better diffs even if you force the variable declaration into a future modification).
As for bikeshedding this piece of code further, if I steal some ideas from chrismorgan [1] and embedding-shape [2] who appear to be way more seasoned JavaScript programmers than me:
const $t = document.createElement('table');
for (const r of
[
['one', 'two', 'three'],
['four', 'five', 'six' ],
]) {
const $r = $t.insertRow();
for (const e of r)
$r.insertCell().innerText = e;
};
document.body.append($t);