Some of these responses… wow.

Using modern HTML and CSS will get you pretty far these days.

For example, dealing with forms used to be problematic in a few different ways without JavaScript or something server-side.

Now form validation can be done with CSS [1].

For example, static site hosts like Netlify have services for dealing with the form data [2]. 100 free form submissions per month.

I agree that tooling is out of control. Jekyll [3] is great for getting started with building static sites. When using Jekyll, my build tool of choice is a Makefile [4].

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/#styling-...

[2]: https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/

[3]: https://jekyllrb.com/

[4]: https://blog.mads-hartmann.com/2016/08/20/make.html

For personal projects, sure. But good luck writing a medium to large sized app, full of business logic in Vanilla JS.

The hate for JS frameworks is usually warranted, in this case I think nuance is missing. It's also not as black and white as people paint it to be, IMO.

The hate for large frameworks is warranted by their poor performance and bloat while struggling to achieve simple objectives in the most challenging ways.