I never said they were overkill (and I'd argue Redux or similar pattern is useful even for fairly simple apps). For an app of any reasonable complexity you'll

I never said they were overkill (and I'd argue Redux or similar pattern is useful even for fairly simple apps). For an app of any reasonable complexity you'll have "architectural overhead" whether or not you're using your architecture or someone else's. That's just a given. (And if you don't, you have more overhead trying to figure out what you were doing.) More complex build process? Yep, if you're not writing all the code yourself, and you want to distribute a single file, and ES2015 (or other) transpilation, and minification, sure. But you can use all the libraries in question without much of a build process at all, just load 'em all up and use ES5. Complex build processes are a result of wanting to distribute and write code in a certain way. They're not a requirement.