Too good NOT to share.
My brothers and sisters in Christ I want you to know that I care about your souls enough to share these truths with you:
- You don’t need JavaScript to make a web page.
- You don’t need JavaScript to write styles.
- You don’t need JavaScript to make an animation.
- You don’t need JavaScript just to show content.
I think basic or even complex stuff is fine in vanilla js.
The problems show up as you scale the team and code base. You can do a large project in vanilla js but you’re going to have to solve a lot of the same problems frameworks/libraries have already solved. Maybe it’s worth it, maybe it’s not.
On the other hand:
Most Frontends are not super interactive google tables like applications and never will be and frameworks won’t magically make your code maintainable or enable you to work with 50 other guys on that page that interacts with a simple CRUD-API, yet people choose a complex framework meant for huge projects and pile even more dependencies on to of it for that kind of stuff. it’s like using a fleet of 18 wheel trucks for grocery shopping, when a basket and a bicycle are really all you’ll need for that.
i’d guess most websites would be fine and feel “modern” with html, css and a small library for ajax stuff, because doing that by hand is repetetive and error prone.