[vbezhenar]

I agree. I like pure JS, but it just does not scale by default. You need to have awesome architecture skills and you need to constantly observe your codebase, you need to write half of framework if you want to avoid frameworks. Of course it's possible, but it's not possible for vast majority of developers, including myself.

May be we need some education: how to write 100 kLoC pureJS WebApp and keep sanity. I didn't see that kind of articles. I know that my pureJS web apps can survive few hundreds LoC. Then it becomes a mess. With React it's much easier to structure an app so it's maintainable, different parts are separated, etc.

[heather45879]

Yeah the frameworks do force a disciplined approach. It still boils down to separation of concerns like presentation from business logic etc. Historically the front-end computation existed on the backend but with NodeJS everything sort of mushed together (creating more complexity and possible architecture mistakes). Template libraries are great way to Split View from Model—but even that is taken care of in languages now like Golang templates and JavaScript template literals etc.

I suppose the question is: how much time does it take to master stock HTML5/CSS/JavaScript versus mastering a framework, through-and-through.

Frameworks are constantly in flux but the foundation they are built upon is a more lasting skill set. But the more we spend learning framework X we are spending time away from foundations.

[cies]

Did you have a look at Elm? Even more easy to structure maintainable apps.