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But devs should have a firm understanding of Vanilla JS so that when (not if, but when) they need to do something the framework designer never thought of, they'll be able to develop a workable solution.

In fairness to Wes Bos, he says right on the landing page that "these things are great and often needed, but can obstruct learning and constrain initial understanding."

Keep in mind we're not talking just about JS on the web running in web browsers. It runs on servers. It runs as standalone applications. If you are targeting a non-web environment you're not writing for quirks of different browsers, you know the runtime environment you are targeting explicitly. It isn't that bad.