Small libraries win out every time, as soon as there is a decent package management system. Just look at what happened with Node and NPM - npm really rocks, and the whole node ecosystem is choke full of great and small libraries that fit together nicely.

I write node on backend and frontend, and package the frontend using browserify into a single index.html file that contains everything the app needs, so it's one HTTP request to fetch the app. That's the new binary format of the web, and all the dependency management is done for you. It's bliss. For the frontend I used vanilla JS to write a small Backbone-style library to meet my needs: https://github.com/techlayer/espresso.js because even Backbone seemed too monolithic to me (requires jQuery/Zepto).

I've tried React and Angular, but I simply don't understand what they offer over Vanilla JS. What developers really need is to agree on a package standard (NPM!) so that small libs can flourish. There are tonnes of great libs on github but unless they are in npm, it's just a hassle, let's face it. Frontend devs need to adopt the same approach of publishing everything to npm as Node devs have been doing for years. You don't see monolithic frameworks in Node world because the package management system just works. I don't care about standards, but if everyone embraced something the world would be a much happier place.