Indeed! I swore off Web development a couple times because of the mess but now my whole party games platform is made with plain JS, no bundling, no post-processing, no big frameworks and it's pretty good. (Although I did recently augment it with some JSDoc types, for long-term maintainability)

At least three devs have asked why I wasn't using some reactive framework or big library. I know why: I'm much more productive without! Simple DOM helpers go a long way: https://jklm.fun/common/dom.js

(If you're curious: https://jklm.fun)