Of course – at the end you have to update the DOM somehow. But if there were a model containing all the ACF data it wouldn’t interfere with anything, you sill would be able to traverse the DOM directly, but you would be able to traverse the model as well. The model should store references to DOM elements.
The biggest problem about DOM traversing is relying on document structure, which may change (because of changes in ACF or in WP core).
Another abstraction layer would make the logic not dependent on document structure.
OK, I made a huge off-topic 🙂
