Is it bad to write without all these JS tools? We just use Visual Studio and include the standalone Vue.js file. We write plain css (no sass etc) and js with some occasional JQuery. We don't use Nodejs and its build tools (Kinda don't like the complexity all those tools bring. You are more worried about the tooling than the actual problem at hand). We use Ajaxmin and Httpcombiner. That's it for Frontend.

Vuejs is great. Found it to be easy and simple to understand. Big thumbs up for Evan You.