It truly, truly depends on the conceptual size of the application you're writing. Small components with simple interactions? Use something like Vue without comp

It truly, truly depends on the conceptual size of the application you're writing. Small components with simple interactions? Use something like Vue without compilation, and you'll have a low barrier to entry. But if you're writing complex business logic, trying to build pipelines of client-side data whose derivations are fed into a myriad of components, and you'll want things like type constraints, module hierarchies, compiler support for things like JSX to simplify the cognitive load of understanding what a thing-that-outputs-HTML-like-stuff does. At the end of the day, compiler setup is O(1), and code complexity is at least Ω(N) in how difficult it becomes to understand a codebase. It's worth doing anything you can with the compiler to reduce complexity in large codebases.