You can still do all that in JS, novel syntactic sugar aside.
As an example slip some DOM methods into your code and watch people go into convulsions like an angry zombie on cocaine.
It is several orders of magnitude faster. It’s also how I prefer to code because managing state isn’t challenging and I am not hopelessly paralyzed by imperative code.
DOM manipulation is perfectly fine for interacting with styled documents, the web's forté. If your website amounts to a set of configuration forms and a blog then you probably don't need React.
That said, I’m am quite free to choose not to install npm packages that use Babel or Webpack, and I that’s what I choose when I have a choice.
Certainly don’t have that choice at my work.