What are some alternatives of vim-surround

I use vim-surround so much that it has become an essential part of my Vim experience. I will continue to use it with gusto. But it does garner a question and that the facilities it provides are rather common in editing source code in general which leads me to wonder what are the "vim --clean" ways to perform the same actions that vim-surround offers.

Say I run Vim on a device where getting a git clone of the plugin difficult. Maybe it only has access to its own config and doesn't have a user accessible file system or something. What kinds of vanilla commands could be done to simulate what vim-surround does?

And if there isn't a clean alternative shouldn't the facilities vim-surround offeres be built into the base executable to begin with? I find it hard to believe we never needed to surround text in Vim prior to Tpope's amazing plugin. There has to have been more basic ways to accomplish such.

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