You certainly can, and we did, with NodeBB. We use plain html, css, and js (with jquery) and a couple of bespoke components that work for our needs (templating

You certainly can, and we did, with NodeBB. We use plain html, css, and js (with jquery) and a couple of bespoke components that work for our needs (templating engine, i18n, utils methods, etc.) We call out to libraries when doing things that are better handled via a library. Guess what, when you use a bespoke solution for common tasks, you end up with something that blows past every other competitor's benchmarks, without even trying. e.g. take a look at Benchpress, our templating engine: https://github.com/benchpressjs/benchpressjs/ https://github.com/benchpressjs/benchpressjs/