[zonethundery]

I think the responses to your comment show the whirlwind of 'wtf?' confronting any programmer contemplating front end development for the first time.

What you wrote is probably true (and the one "see how far you can get in react only" comment is probably a decent path, but the landscape is overwhelming.

[LegionMammal978]

Yeah, the frontend scene definitely suffers from hype-driven development: it's not good enough that we have a tool to do the job, we need the tool to be the bestest ever on every possible metric, so we end up with a treadmill of additional frameworks, bundlers, etc. that are hyped up in any given year.

E.g., I might think to ask, "Which tool creates the output with the lesser overhead on the client, Webpack or Vite?" But I can't find anything solid about that, since everyone's too busy hyping up the dev experience or whatever.

It's a shame that you have to swim against the tide so heavily, if you value simplicity over immediate kitchen-sink levels of functionality. Personally, I've landed on pure client-side React (with any bundler, or with Babel alone if you're feeling adventurous) since it doesn't try to have any purpose other than updating components according to state. Many of its competitors have too much poorly-documented magic for my taste.