Does anyone have a simple way to make rendered images from osm data? Usually it involves postgres, but I wish there was a renderer that could use the vector tiles directly...

https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker can generate vector tiles directly from *.osm.pbf files. Then serve the vector tiles with leaflet+mapbox-gl-leaflet, mapbox gl js, openlayers 3 or similar. https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles