You can write in JavaScript without any frameworks and libs. The language itself is pretty self-sufficient.

5 years ago I started https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons to focus on interactive writing. Just text and JavaScript to make interactive illustrations. There are no dependencies in principle. Nor external, neither external. Only text and code. Tons of fun, no red tape.

You might think that this works for small projects only. Well, there are more than 50 interactive pages now (would have been more, but I spent 1.5 years writing a book), and things haven't started to fall apart yet.

I strongly advice vanilla programming for hobby. JavaScript or not.