[cube00]

As much as I dislike Google, Lit has been a nice middle ground for me.

It's lighter then a framework, events are vanilla JavaScript so you don't have to figure out how to make a JS libray you've found work within some framework's custom event bus.

It has enough rendering support so you don't need to update everything with .innerHTML. Change the state of a component, lit will call your render function but only update the parts of the DOM that have changed. I felt that was a nice partial answer to suggestions you need a virtual DOM because updating the real DOM is slow.