I don't know the history of the documentary hypothesis: was it, or was it seen to be, one of the first suggestion that the Torah was combined from different source texts?

If so, it seems unsurprising that people with widely differing opinions tend to conflate "the Torah was assembled from different source texts at all" and "the Torah was assembled from different source texts in the overly-literal verse-by-verse way that 19-century textual analysis happened to suggest first" in their minds. Which leads to an ideological knee-jerk reaction to defend or attack the particular details of that theory?