The vanilla code was much easier to maintain too. React comes in your way when things get complicated and the work arounds produce really messy code.
Edit:
Project (GitHub): https://github.com/labmlai/labml/tree/master/app
It's a mobile/web app to monitor machine learning experiment.
It's not the final say. Just a strong signal among many others.
Also there is nobody stopping you from writing extremely messy React applications...
Also I think you got a typo at https://github.com/labmlai/labml/blob/master/app/ui/src/view...
Ton of abstractions is an overstatement. https://github.com/vpj/weya is more like a helper function around `document.createElement`.
This all seems so narrow and parochial, like people who have never left their own village. There's a wide world of useful technologies and design techniques out there (including React) and the simplest possible design that solves your problems is usually best.
People running away from "bloated frameworks" very often end up reimplementing a significant portion of the bloat. But usually with fewer ressources and fewer testing, so you can guess what happens most of the time...