HTML has built-in templates now, and custom elements (web components) provide composability. If the built-in templating is not quite powerful enough (it has no logic or variables) there’s developit/htm which is basically JSX but parsing in the browser.

React is still easier, but it comes at a maintainability tax because you have to keep upgrading to new react versions and port to new react wrapper framework versions if you want to keep a codebase in active development. Vanilla web development has no such problem because web standards remain backwards compatible.

For a small project where I don’t care about SEO / server-side rendering I absolutely prefer vanilla web dev over React now.