> However the polish you are used to on dropdowns plus countless other controls you interact with every day require javascript.

I got one can do without the "polish I am used to". I'm generally fine with HTML form controls.

My problem with JavaScript frameworks is they are huge beasts that build their components out of non-semantic block elements. A button or text field is just a giant mass of divs and spans with events attached everywhere with one-off CSS. The browser is stuck doing tons of work in its single-threaded JavaScript engine to build and manage these components.

It's a lot of wasted memory and clock cycles to recreate a text field the browser already provides. It makes for a worse user experience, wastes my battery, and eats up my bandwidth. To me it's not polish but waste.