Hi, I myself have an article about the cost of frameworks, so I have points in agreement with this piece for sure. I should say though that this goes a bit too far.

You can, for sure, do everything with Vanilla JS. It doesn't mean this is the best way to do things. Unless we are dealing with otherworldly talented programmers with too much time on their hands, big projects in Vanilla JS will be a nightmare to traverse.

The reason is clear: the native JS API, especially for dealing with the DOM, has this mix of inconsistency with Java influences that make it quite hard to read out of the box, and this plus HTML being this "language" optimised for building static websites out of 1996 means we have to, yes, reinvent the wheel to make HTML minimally dynamic, what is basically what everyone wants now and the main reason why people use frameworks.

P.S.: this doesn't affect much in the point of the article, but there is just one of the resource links you pointed out that actually works as a resource link to me: xo-js.dev is offline, vanilla.js.org is too old (JQuery is not a 2022 thing) and, finally, gomakethings.org points to the same place as vanillajstoolkit.com, which turns out to be the only useful link to me.