I've used React for a while now, and I agree with you that most of these libraries are pretty garbage. I've solved this problem by just not using any of them.

I've used React for a while now, and I agree with you that most of these libraries are pretty garbage. I've solved this problem by just not using any of them. These days I use two libraries: Preact and Immer. And I only introduce Immer to a project if state management becomes a pain point in the project, so I often don't even use Immer. I import these in my project with: <!-- in my base HTML template --> <script src='path/to/immer.js'></script> // in my JS import { h, Component, render } from './path/to/preact.js'; import produce from immer; This is sort of janky because Immer doesn't provide a real JS module, but basically all this does is pull in a total of four variables: h, Component, render, and produce.