“Feeling wasteful” is not a logical evaluation of the technology. Does it feel wasteful when you used an incredibly powerful computer capable of almost anything to post a text comment to a website in the same way you could have 20 years ago?

VueJS is very lightweight and loads almost instantly. It runs on even very old computers well. Native JS will never be able to compete with frameworks because frameworks have the ability to rapidly innovate and try new things without worrying about having to keep them around forever.

IMO the browser should become something like a CPU where it provides the low level components to do anything and the website provides the framework to make it easy.

It doesn’t “feel wasteful” to use C or Python to print hello world when it could have been done in raw ASM.