[Tainnor]

Obviously you can build successful apps with frameworks (just as you can write them without, or with lighter-weight frameworks). The question is always how maintainable it will be. Of course, there's also always survivorship bias if we look at examples of successful apps.

Consider, for example, that there's a famous video by Shopify (now already a couple of years old) where they explain how it took them a year to upgrade Rails. In that whole video, I didn't see anybody even ask the question whether there wasn't something fundamentally wrong if it takes you a year to upgrade one piece of your tech stack - something which has no direct impact on value delivered to customers.