How to grab all li elements from a ref() element?

[rowild]

In my app, the menu is build dynamically after receiving some JSON from an API (stored in navItems). Once that is there, the element div ref="navMenu" id="nav-menu" gets populated with a 2-level menu using nested ul and li elements. Using watchEffect I can check if the menu has been build and print the ref() to the console:

<template>
        <div id="nav-menu" ref="navMenu">
            <ul v-if="navItems">
              <li v-for="item in navItems" :key="item.id">
                {{ item.name }}
                <ul v-if="item.menu_items_o2m">
                  <li v-for="child in item.menu_items_o2m" :key="child.id">
                    <template v-if="child.menu_items_o2m">
                      {{ child.name }}
                      <ul>
                        <li v-for="grandchild in child.menu_items_o2m" :key="grandchild.id">
                          <router-link :to="`/${item.slug}/${child.slug}/${grandchild.slug}`">{{ grandchild.title }}</router-link>
                        </li>
                      </ul>
                    </template>
                    <router-link v-else :to="`/${item.slug}/${child.slug}`">{{ child.name }}</router-link>
                  </li>
                </ul>
              </li>
            </ul>
        </div>
</template>

<script setup>
[... imports, etc ...]

const navMenu = ref(null)

watchEffect(() => {
  if (navItems.length > 0 && navMenu.value) {
    console.log('navMenu.value =',    navMenu.value); // prints the html from above with proper values and content
  }
})
</script>

Now I would like to apply some GSAP magic to each of the li elements. In order to do so I need to get all the li elements, but I do not know how. A simple const allListElements = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('#nav-menu li')) remains empty:

watchEffect(() => {
  if (navItems.length > 0 && navMenu.value) {
    console.log('   navMenu.value =',    navMenu.value);

    const allListElements = document.querySelectorAll('#nav-menu li')
  }
})

What is the correct way in this case to grab all the list elements of that menu?

[rowild]

5 minutes after posting I find my mistake... of course! Damn it!
(The error is not in the example above due to reduced version. The example above should actually work...)