Sorry, I guess you're right that I don't fully agree after all, because creating a site without Angular 1 (or Vue) would be certainly a nightmare for me too.
For some reason people in these threads think there's a battle between jQuery/vanillaJS vs a framework when the real distinction is the complexity of the application you're building.
Yes, when your needs are simple enough, you don't need anything. For some reason people get upvoted on HN/Reddit when they point this out.