I'm learning web dev right now, after not having really touched it since about the turn of the century. I bounced off of React & friends a few times before dis

I'm learning web dev right now, after not having really touched it since about the turn of the century. I bounced off of React & friends a few times before discovering the Lean Web movement. I'm genuinely happier for having found it. As a beginner, things like React and Elm feel opaque and obscenely complicated, all in order to solve problems that I don't actually have. Vanilla HTML+CSS+JS offers a much more pleasant learning curve, and has made it a fair bit easier to maintain momentum as I learn. From what I can tell, I'll probably also be able to take them really, really far before I need to adopt a front-end framework. I'm actually kind of wondering, now that I am more familiar with the history of the technology, if the continuing popularity of front-end frameworks is largely a hold-over from an earlier time when Web standards were weaker. Vanilla JavaScript and CSS have become a lot more capable over the past few years, but dropping back down to them may be technically or socially difficult. It's always easier to add more things to the pile than it is to take them away. Sunk costs and all that.