I have personally noticed a similar thing as well. The solution that worked for me is to use less. In my case, I have settled for multipage applications (I find

I have personally noticed a similar thing as well. The solution that worked for me is to use less. In my case, I have settled for multipage applications (I find that SPA's increase the complexity of a UI exponentially) and I primary use jQuery for any UI related things with RequireJS to make it modular and Grunt to build/compile everything and obviously NPM for dependency management. I have used Backbone in the past but I don't find it very good. Other than that I using plain Javascript, the kind that runs in the browser. I don't really mind if I have to write function() or () =>. One thing I'm very conscious of though is not to use jQuery to manipulate the DOM. I.e. I have a data object that I pass into a render method in which I "empty" a parent node and use jQuery .append to render the entire thing based on that data model. Basically, my template is a JavaScript function. Crude, but it works well. In an event handler such as a click I will update the data object and then re-render. I.e. a typical MVC style of flow. Doing this allows me to actually build solutions rather than spending the majority of my time dicking around with a gazillion libraries, frameworks, transpilers and what's not. I find all of it interesting but I'm a one man band I have to produce working projects on time and on budget that do what they are supposed to do. For my projects, my users simply couldn't care if the UI was built with jQuery or React. For your project that might be different though.