I was in the same boat as you. I'm mostly a backend person and I had avoided frontend frameworks and used vanilla JavaScript directly because I did't like the complexity of modern JavaScript frameworks.

Recently, I tried Next.js and it changed my mind a bit. It prefers convention over configuration, requiring tremendously less configuration compared to other frontend frameworks. It is still a bit complex, but hides the fact nicely under a well-defined abstraction. I might try another project with Next.js in the near future.