It's interesting that first little JavaScript libraries and one-liners were popular in the 1990s. Then AJAX and large framework libraries like Yahoo YUI, Ext J

It's interesting that first little JavaScript libraries and one-liners were popular in the 1990s. Then AJAX and large framework libraries like Yahoo YUI, Ext JS, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) got popular. Then JQuery a more lightweight library got popular. Then John Resig's (JQuery) book "Pro JavaScript Techniques" (2006). Later Douglas Crockford's book "JavaScript the Good Parts" (2008) were highly influential. HTML5 and JavaScript5 came along. A new wave of JS5 vanilla style influenced by JS5 and Crockford's book got traction and more and more replaced JQuery (2010 onwards). HTML5 browsers got widespread, the JS performance got a lot faster (JIT VMs) and attracted a lot more developers. CoffeeScript and new single-page frameworks like AngularJS and Ember.js got popular ca. 2012. Google initially focused on Dart language as a replacement for Javascript and later transpiled to JS (beside others). Microsoft aquirehired ex-IBM group now known as Monaco code editor (VS Online, VSCode, etc) and created TypeScript that suits their C++/C# massive code base and coding pattern better. They influenced the development of ES6/7 to include "classes" syntax, etc. Google added "Shadow DOM" feature to Chrome and proposed it as a new HTML5 feature. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webcomponents/shadowdom/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webcomponents/shadowd... Shadow DOM hasn't been integrated in other browser (http://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdom http://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdom ) though Facebook thought the idea was good ("Virtual DOM") and re-implemented the idea as JavaScript library; what is now known as ReactJS framework (got popular in 2014). On the otherside NodeJS with NPM and its ecosystem of many tiny libraries got popular in 2011. ES6/7 got popular on server and client side (though later still needs a transpiler step). So we are again with huge JS framworks on the client side (1MB minified JS files are common but not funny on mobile devices). And highly modular small libraries on the server side (NodeJS). Probably in time when full ES6/7 and Shadow DOM support gets traction in all modern browser, we will see another wave of more lean vanilla ES6/7 code without the huge libraries. You can write a super responsive and fast JS web app in less than 300KB code. You ask for trouble with your 1+MB JS file, especially on mobile devices that will crash or the users has to wait 30+sec on a cellular connection. Lean vanilla JavaScript is great and high performant. Over-engineered frameworks make your life easier to start but will make it harder to stay in touch and maintain. Hopefully ShadowDOM browser support gets traction.