I'm still using backbone.js within our app but a lot of people seem to be using things like:

* https://github.com/component/view for views built on top of reactive for declarative bindings

* https://github.com/component/model for models

* https://github.com/component/router for routing

So what we have so far from these 3 libraries is basically a decomposed backbone with declarative bindings. That will cover 99% of your typical app. I don't find there is too much boilerplate.