I even did a 3 month django project with a view that was almost entirely JavaScript—it would have been a perfect candidate for react but I refused.

As a compromise with myself I used es6 js on that and eliminated use of jQuery from my code.

About a month ago I started work on react. I had very similar feelings going in and was annoyed at having to figure out the node dependency thing. And I was aghast at the “tool chain” which is the post processing you need to do on React and other modern front end.

However, I was really surprised at how much better it is to build front end using this rather than html templates and sprinkles of js.

I was also surprised to find out that the django community barely has a pulse compared to what is happening in react.

It’s safe back there, but there is no innovation. Once you see what is happening in modern web, it feels like a ghost town.

I think it’s a pretty good time to get into React right now. CRA just got an update, functional components are mainstream and now there is this nextjs.

I encourage you to give react a try, at the very least it will make you think more about why you’re building the way you are.

Then after you learn that if you want to create a full app, vue (in vue-cli) has config templates that will help you set everything up so you can just start adding the pages to the app. A full app is nice because the compiler and linting will catch a lot of js errors making your app more reliable, allowing you to write larger apps (this is the biggest reason people use these frameworks).

The concepts in Vue are similar enough to React, Nuxt, Next, etc that it's pretty easy to learn the others after you have the basics down.