[selalipop]

It's not just about web requests: Small things like the select that reflects various font choices correctly, consistently styling form elements as deeply as the site does, the live updating rich formatting inside the main input (shockingly annoying to deal with, even with React), the per-word fade-in effects for text with memoization and other state-dependent optimizations since Chrome chokes on too many spans, handling accessibility for all of these little pieces...

There'd be a lot of "just a little bit of vanilla Javascript and CSS" sprinkled all over that'd all need to have state managed in a manual way that wouldn't be a meaningful improvement over React.

Like I said, I'm working on something where seemingly minute UI/UX details matter to the target user. So I can't just say "CSS and Vanilla JS don't support that without pulling teeth, it's a small thing, so I'm going to ignore it". Sometimes that's going to be a valid strategy and sometimes it's not.