That's the idea. Various tools and power-user features benefit from the things that modern JS frameworks give you. But the basic experience of reading articles should support the lowest-common denominator.

Most JS frameworks consider the SPA use-case to be the "happy path". There are a few outliers like the Stimulus family or Alpine (which I don't think existed at the time of the RFC) that expect to be sprinkled in to server-rendered HTML, but scaling these tools to full-blown apps may prove difficult.

I think Vue can operate in between these two use-cases better than some of the alternatives. Being able to compile templates at runtime is also a useful feature in a legacy environment, where you can't just transpile all the things ahead of time. You have to ship some extra code for this, but it's nothing compared to the cost of shipping (and running) all of Babel, which you'd need to compile JSX.