Is it my impression or is Paul on some sort of a crusade to downplay the dev ergonomics of React and try to convince people that it's "slow"?

TodoMVC benchmarks have been done before: https://github.com/pygy/todomvc-perf-comparison . So sure, there's room for performance improvements in mainstream frameworks, and React is not the fastest thing in the universe, but come on. Maintaining a large project in vanilla js is largely equivalent to writing code in assembler when there are good C compilers: it's doable, and required in a handful of situations, but not really wise for 99% of real world projects.

Re: Tom's response: Something that he didn't mention (which is not surprising since he's an Ember dev) is that frameworks do sometimes detract from end user experience by imposing "opinionated" complexity and assumptions that might prevent devs from doing certain specific things and settling with suboptimal UX - the old adage of "if you want to deviate from the holy way(tm) you're on your own"

I'm kinda in the middle of the two opinions: it's definitely important to have access to the "metal" (both in terms of actually being able to code against low level APIs, and in terms of the amount of effort required to wade through framework abstractions in order to get there), but even using vanilla js, a complex app does need a "framework" (in the sense of having rules for where things should be and how they should interact with one another, and in the sense that any non-trivial app will have "library-level" plumbing). So, why not meet in the middle and use a lightweight framework that does 95% of things well enough to actually be used in non-trivial mobile apps[1] but that doesn't have high enough byte count to be bloated?

[1] http://en.lichess.org/mobile

Close.

Front-end frameworks are one solution to the problem of managing the complexity involved in making an app.

After working with a few of them, I'm not really sure that they're the best ones.