Further, being against a bloated framework is not the same as being against frameworks. Those frameworks are actually principles. It’s possible for a team to come up with or use existing principles without using a framework.
Finally, “always use React” brings other costs. You need a team to build your system twice. That means you need bigger teams; more funding to do the same thing, and so on. You add complexity at the team level and at the software level when using frameworks. The person above you said that blindly “following best practices” is bad while stating a “best practice” of always start with React. That particular “best practice” not always being the best practice is the entire point of this thread.
> Most people seemingly advocating for non-React are actually saying to start simple and add the complexity where and when it’s needed.
In my experience that’s actually not the case. That might be what people claim, but in my professional experience some people really don’t like frontend work and they try to avoid frontend frameworks because they think it’ll make their work more tolerable, but what usually happens is they start out “simple” but pretty quickly product requirements come in that are hard to do without some framework, then there’s a scramble to add a framework or hack it into some parts of the app.
The second assumption where I believe you are going wrong is that 'product requirements' will always come in and force using a framework. Imho if I look around at most of the webapps I am using, very few of them actually need a SPA framework. Take Jira for example. Does it really need to be fully a SPA? It has some highly interactive parts, which could be done with eg web components, but it's mostly a boring CRUD app that would work fine with eg htmx.
You can't just switch horses in the middle of the stream. You have to ride back to the ranch, saddle up on a different horse, and restart your entire journey on a better horse.
Having been a web developer for a quarter century, I know how tempting it is (yes, for small projects) to try to just wing it and do everything without a framework, and I know what a tarpit that way of thinking is. If you disagree, then you were certainly welcome to share you own opinion.
This assumes that non-React approaches are simple.
So you delete the non-framework garbage code and start over. lol.
