The answer is will a monolithic framework or a set of libraries help you build the best product with quality and quickly. Whichever one will help you build a b

The answer is will a monolithic framework or a set of libraries help you build the best product with quality and quickly. Whichever one will help you build a better product is different depending on the context, project, scope, team and timeline. In the end I am not a big fan of monolithic frameworks, I prefer libraries much like OP describes that can be swapped or changed for parts of the app (routing, data, templating, scripts, style, etc). But sometimes you are on teams and need a common baseline/plane to keep consistency so you go with frameworks sometimes rather than having to educate/train on custom. In the end, what helps you ship faster and helps you focus on your product is always the best choice. If you are spending all day learning how to use the framework, going to conferences to learn it, building things in it and jimmying things so you can get it to do what you need by jumping through hoops, then it may be a drag on a good product. Typically frameworks get you 90% of the way fast and the final 10% or customizing too much is painful, not to mention updates where APIs change wholesale. Custom gets you there slower but you can finish faster at the end as the control is immense. Custom usually allows more flexibility and changes that are on your schedule not the new versions of frameworks that might throw a wrench in timelines from time to time. Simplicity is the key to good custom apps to beat the maintenance time of monolithic frameworks. A framework is an abstraction and you have to decide if that abstraction is worth it, the real platform is javascript, css, html in the end, how much stack do you want on top of that is a question that changes by project.