[skrebbel]

The key problem all these frameworks solve is to let you store (and track changes to) data in a different structure than your UI. The moment you're not building a pure CRUD app, where the UI and the data always follow the exact same tree structure, but something more complex, tightly coupling the data to the UI like you'd do with jQuery apps gets messy and problematic.

To be frank, when all you see is "complexity that sucks productivity" I wonder whether you've ever tried to make a non-trivial SPA without them. You'll either end up building lots of spaghetti (like happened with every jQuery app I ever saw), or inventing your own makeshift framework that solves the same problems, kinda-sorta, hopefully-good-enough.

[CharlieDigital]

    > I wonder whether you've ever tried to make a non-trivial SPA without them.

I personally have. React launched in 2013. Here's a real-time enabled browser chat app I built in 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG_W0VxjzbM and at this point, it had been years of building similarly complex JavaScript apps.

Many sufficiently complex apps existed long before React. The "OG" Outlook Web App was certainly not lacking in complexity.

The challenge is that it requires far more skill and a deeper understanding of DOM, JavaScript, and CSS. It requires being more diligent about encapsulating logic.

What React did was it made front-end more accessible to a wider audience. The skill barrier is lower (though traded for complexity elsewhere, IMO). Devs now probably start with React and Tailwind before learning raw DOM and CSS. The good ones will eventually learn it, the mediocre ones will vaguely know that it exists.