Most of the time (and speaking from experience here), any “interaction” with inlined SVGs happens at compile time, setting the size or colors. Animating opacity, scale is done via CSS on the container element.
And for complex animations you resort to Lottie. So interacting with SVG via its DOM API is incredibly rare.
No I don't agree. Simple things like styling the inside of the SVG or animating the colors is pretty common and does not require reaching for Lottie. I don't think Lottie is all that commonplace outside of very large codebases in borderline enterprise environments.
You're probably right in general, but I had a need just the other day to animate something other than opacity and scale. I realised I would need to inline the SVG to make it work, and it was pleasantly straightforward.
And for complex animations you resort to Lottie. So interacting with SVG via its DOM API is incredibly rare.