Frameworks allow websites to be built faster, maintained with less expertise, and changed faster over time. That is the benefit to the user. That things are slower than they could be doesn't matter to most users. Most companies can't afford to pay people to maintain a "good + fast + quick to make changes" site.

There's an argument to be made that if business would just simplify their needs and desires to make sure everything is simple and fast, isn't that in and of itself putting devs before users? This works both ways.

Also, if you don't want to pare down your features to barebones, and you're not going to use a framework, someone's inventing one. If you have someone who's going to build you a superfast framework and be a cool hacker, then you probably can't afford them, or you can't afford to keep them. Then we get a post on HN about how bad this one coyboy coders's framework was and all the effort that was spent to modernize using %modern_framework%.