Yeah that's one of the things I love about Svelte. It tends to enhance fundamental web knowledge rather than forcing you to think in convoluted ways.
Features like actions put you close to the bare metal so to speak. I use those all the time.
It's an incredibly refreshing experience compared to other frameworks that create custom concepts for everything they do.
The builder.io team made a tool called Mitosis[^0] that lets you input a component written in almost any framework and automatically recreate that same component in any other framework including Vue, React, Qwik, Angular, Svelte, React Native, Lit, web components, and even Swift
It's always interesting to try out different frameworks and compare the plain HTML version of certain components with this tool
FWIW, I think that "it's much closer to being just javascript™" statement has absolutely held up over time (Angular, esp. the old angular.js is painful compared to React for this reason), AND that Svelte is likely a step closer again (which they can do because they have an entire compiler and aren't reliant on embedded a DSL inside of JavaScript).