[emorning3]

I agree with you that going back to the JQuery days of unmaintainable imperative code would not be a good thing.

But with JQuery I was able to create adaptive UIs by applying 'transforms' to the DOM, I really miss that. Think of the way that 'tag helpers' can apply cross-cutting transforms to Razor Page applications, I used to do things like that with JQuery.

React et al cuts me off from both the browser DOM and it's own virtual DOM, so this I can no longer do this. I have to do everything the React way. Developing with React is far less powerful than JQuery. I still find modern frameworks to be a kind of straight-jacket. I hope to have my transforms back in a rational way someday.

[mr_toad]

React discourages direct DOM access, but it’s still possible.

https://react.dev/learn/escape-hatches

[cassepipe]

It seems like you are a ripe candidate for Svelte !