[jonathrg]

This is not an improvement. Having named variables for things is good actually. They will need to be declared again immediately once you want to modify the code. insertCell(i).innerText = c is a nonsense statement, it should be 2 lines for the 2 operations

[ninjin]

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);

This is now rather minimal and the logic is easy (for me) to follow as the scopes are minimal and namespace uncluttered. It was a rather fun little exercise for a language I am not overly familiar with and I learned a few tricks and perspectives.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45782938

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781591