Incidentally, I've been working on a hobby project lately and just for fun decided to use pure vanilla JavaScript to interact with all browser APIs directly -- not even my old friend jquery. It's been surprisingly fun and easy, partly because modern web browser APIs have gotten so good and are insanely well documented at MDN, to the point where stack overflow and LLMs don't really help much (and when I do use either I just use it to find the appropriate MDN pages)

It's been fantastic. And I'll be able to keep my project insanely performant. I'll be posting it in a Show HN when I seen it cool enough.

Couple concrete examples of web apis getting awesome:

Document.querySwlector or whatever it's called, to do something very similar to original jqueery

Fetch API instead of ajax

Canvas API

Webgpu

There is more to life than just what I do for my job.