I don't think that is an unpopular view. Though I think it is more fair to say people are trying to patch the browser runtime environment and its APIs. JavaScript the language is "fine", it is that doing things the way the browser wants you to do them is often quite verbose, so people build layers of abstraction on top.
Unfortunately these abstraction layers end up being just as, if not more complex than what it is building on top of.
People creating frameworks can work a lot faster than the browser development teams. The modern browser stack is actually getting pretty good, but still some things like creating web components are awkward compared to many of the popular frameworks. And when people find something awkward to do, especially in as flexible a setup as JS, they will make their own abstractions.
My suggestion for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the JS ecosystem is to just work with plain ol' vanilla JS for a while. It'll give you a much better understanding of what is actually going on and you'll likely realize the problems you're trying to solve are pretty straightforward. But you'll also see that things can end up quite verbose (though the comprehensibility will likely be quite high). You'll find that there are some areas that are kind of annoying and this is where when you go back to one of the frameworks you'll see its value (but also likely where it is totally overkill). At the end of the day if you can keep your mindset focused on the browser runtime rather than the specific framework you happen to be using, you'll have a much better time. At least that is my experience.
