Yeah I used to think that. If you have any amount of dynamic data with a non-trivial representation, and you don't want to have to go through awful ad-hoc thin

Yeah I used to think that. If you have any amount of dynamic data with a non-trivial representation, and you don't want to have to go through awful ad-hoc things of "when I update this data structure, tell the stuff on the screen to change" and "when this on-screen value changes, update these parts of the data structure", you eventually end up with an MVC framework: this is not a new idea and JS didn't invent it. And once you have that, adding a bit of structure to make it nice to build up modular components results in something pretty close to Vue or React.