It depends on your use-case. If you're building a static HTML administration UI and the only real UI code you need to write is a "select all" checkbox for a lis

It depends on your use-case. If you're building a static HTML administration UI and the only real UI code you need to write is a "select all" checkbox for a list of items, then porting that UI to React is 100% overkill. If you're building an e-mail client, then definitely not; you need something to handle the complexity. My app has both of the above in it, simple admin/maintenance UIs in static HTML and a ~75k line React/Redux/Typescript application for the client-facing work with nice animations and professionally designed custom icons and so on. The client-facing application could not be done without a framework of some kind; it is just too big. The problem is that most tutorials and documentation focus on really simple use-cases like building a to-do list and so on. You end up with tons of setup code for actually a really simple thing that you could achieve in 5 minutes with DOM manipulation. If you can't imagine how this is useful for something more complex then you probably haven't worked on a UI complicated enough to need it. I don't think it makes you unemployable to not know these frameworks but as a full stack developer you really ought to at least understand the problems they solve. Try building a webmail client with JQuery and you'll see what I mean.