>The lesson I learned is not to use anything bloated or to use it to target a specific issue,while keeping the core of my codebase totally decoupled from framew

>The lesson I learned is not to use anything bloated or to use it to target a specific issue,while keeping the core of my codebase totally decoupled from framework X or Z That's a bad lesson. JavaScript, on it's own, does not give you enough to write proper large-scale applications. You will have to commit to some framework, whether one your wrote yourself or one you got from somewhere else. And this isn't just a JavaScript issue. Even better designed languages (Java, C++, C#) will require some sort of framework to augment their language constructs, in specific cases and when working with code of a certain size. Packages and classes are just not enough sometimes. >I feel for people migrating from ExtJS to AngularJS for instance , it basically means rewriting all the code. Then don't do it. There's nothing wrong with having a code-base in ExtJS in a world in which Angular is popular. If ExtJS is doing its job and your software is doing what it's supposed to, why would you migrate to Angular? Why would you rewrite anything? Because Angular is more popular? So what?! You may have 100k lines of working, battle-tested code, 3 developers have been working on for several years. No sane person would just throw that away with a rewrite.