You should probably try to understand why React(and other similar frameworks) were created. If you have very little experience and have only built simple thing

You should probably try to understand why React(and other similar frameworks) were created. If you have very little experience and have only built simple things, the disadvantages of building a web application using traditional imperative DOM manipulation won't be clear to you. But as soon as you start building something complicated, these disadvantages start to show themselves pretty fast. Imagine that your application is complicated and needs data from many different API calls and has a lot of state which can cause it to do different things at different times. With simple DOM manipulation, you will end up with a codebase where nearly any part of it can be doing modifications to the DOM, regardless of what else is happening, and you will probably spend quite a bit of time fixing bugs from, say, two async functions running at different times and thus resulting in a broken DOM or something. To remedy this, you take a step back and you figure that you should probably build an abstraction which takes care of this. You do things in stages: 1. Do all async work 2. process data 3. render UI from data. Now things are certainly a bit simpler and you've avoided the DOM race conditions, but you're running into performance issues, because you're re-rendering your entire application from scratch every time you get new data. You can optimize this on a case-by-case basis and try to ensure that some of it can happen in parallel, but to do it generically, you essentially have to do reconciliation.. and at this point, you're already halfway to writing something like react/angular/vue, just minus the millions of manhours that have gone into those frameworks to make them work as well and as efficiently as they do. I think that you should do whatever you feel like doing because that will give you the best experience. But I think picking up something like React will definitely benefit you in the long run, and if you ever decide to try to do this professionally, it is pretty unlikely you'll find a place that builds serious web apps using vanilla JS / CSS / HTML(and even if you did, you probably don't want to work there).