The code you linked is what React helped me get away from. There’s multiple files in different folders for one screen. It’s hard to see how it composes, which is a useful boundary as it lets me know in the scope of that part of the UI.
UI is _hard_. There’s complexity that needs to go somewhere, and I’m one of those who prefer to push as much if it that isn’t business logic into a framework.
This becomes exponentially more important for every engineer you add. Go success is along these lines, with typically only one way to do things it’s much easier to share code.
From the code you linked, I could find my way around, but piecing it all together took a lot more work than any of the frameworks.
You mention only needing to know JS, HTML and CSS. But you missed that you still need to know how all that code is put together, what calls what. How it updates. React needs this too, the only difference with it being a framework is that knowledge transfers to a different project.
And to be clear, I’m not saying you need to use react or a framework—going your own way is often how amazing new things are found.
What I am saying is your attitude isn’t helping you here. React is still arguably the most used framework[0]. There’s a reason so many of us like using it and it’s what you described as “other crap”.
Frameworks help with collaboration, in the same way programming languages do. To do anything interesting with a general purpose language, you’re either going to use a framework, create a new one with good documentation and build a community of engineers around it, or build a halfbaked one that few people understand.
I’m open to other ways of doing things. It’s a good way to grow. I learnt SwiftUI a little while ago, and while I don’t use it regularly it improved my understanding of UI building. I learnt imperative UI API ages ago, and know for sure I want to avoid/contain that into a more manageable declarative approach.
[0] https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/javascript-library/t...