After hacking around with various Neovim "frameworks" I decided I want my text editor to but just that and no more so switched back to Vim and MacVim. The improvements to Vim's scripting language were icing on the cake.
I decided not to give in to any configuration frameworks and I see them as unnecessary complexity.
Initially, I just symlinked my old .vimrc to ~/.config/nvim/init.vim and started adding if sections to configure neovim features while keeping the config backwards-compatible.
Eventually I started rewriting small chunks of it in Lua, and now I'm 100% migrated to init.lua. I think it's a little cleaner this way, but not a life changer. The real power of Lua is for plugin authors.
Perhaps by "frameworks" you meant plugin managers.
On vim, I was using vim-plug, which works fine with neovim too.
At some point I switched to Packer, which is written in Lua and is definitely more powerful. Now I would recommend Lazy instead: https://github.com/folke/lazy.nvim
Yes, it's silly that neovim still doesn't come with built-in plugin management. Installing a plugin should require 0 lines of config.
You can use Neovim without a framework. In fact, for the most part Neovim will work as-is with a .vimrc written for Vim (there are some options that are specific to Vim or Neovim, but not many, as both projects port features from the other).
Initially, I just symlinked my old .vimrc to ~/.config/nvim/init.vim and started adding if sections to configure neovim features while keeping the config backwards-compatible.
Eventually I started rewriting small chunks of it in Lua, and now I'm 100% migrated to init.lua. I think it's a little cleaner this way, but not a life changer. The real power of Lua is for plugin authors.