I do a lot of WP work.

Personally, I like things like Timber, but IMO, you really want to avoid getting very far out from the most basic stuff if you ever want to hand the project off to rando WP folks... I stay away from anything even as complex as sage/roots for those reasons.

Though I don't even like ACF, as I have a bunch of snippets for building post meta interfaces and ACF is large enough that I haven't read all its code. I'd rather just write 200 lines into an MU plugin.

That's interesting! Thanks for the link. Any other suggestions?

I'm honestly considering using React when I have the luxury of hosting on my own server. I find it difficult to go back to other templating systems after the nice 'componentized' approach of React. Hard to justify though.