This is how projects end up with millions of lines of black box dependencies. This is why `node_modules` folders that are hundreds of megabytes exist.
Take a look at benchmarks [0] and tell me, if any framework performs faster than vanilla JS. They probably are faster than vanilla code that you'd be able to write on your own, but that says more about your abilities than the performance of frameworks.
[0] http://www.stefankrause.net/js-frameworks-benchmark6/webdriv...
Doing my own thing is of course possible and in many cases is fast to get something up. But doing it correct and proper takes a lot of time and attention. When I'm trying to get a project going - time is not on my side, but I still want it done correct and proper. If someone comes in and does a complex part of my app correctly, I'd use it. Its NOT a problem.
Edit: By the way, taking a snippet of a line from what I said and quoting it without its context does not make for good discussion.
But it is. You are depending on some complex third party code to do your job, how you want to punt responsibility to someone else is irrelevant. Web developers aren't owning up to the sorry state of front-end web development, because everyone says "it's not my problem", ask Facebook/Google/whatever.
Correct and proper have little meaning if at all in web development, they're usually dictated by the biggest companies and most popular bloggers. Moreover, these definitions are constantly in flux (no pun intended). Nobody cares if your web app correctly follows the proper conventions of your framework. Front-end web developers seem to focus more on navel-gazing about the "developer experience" than results.
I'm having fun doing it but i'm not doing it for fun.
Yes. It's called a web browser.
The additional complexity of react is a drop in the bucket compared to the complexity of the undertlying platform.
Why do you assume that vanilla JS code is terrible? Is it because the average developer can not be trusted to write competent code without the conventions of a framework? If one cannot write competent code without being completely dependent on frameworks, I wouldn't trust them to write code at all.
I won't be able to write efficient vanilla code for something even slightly more complicated than this benchmark, and I wrote one of the fastest virtual dom implementations out there, so what you expect from an average web developer?
Better performance just isn't a valid reason to use a DOM abstraction, it's a non-argument.
The speed of a for-loop is only a part of what makes a codebase 'fast'.
