I am of the opinion that universally all of these front end frameworks -- even the JavaScript ones -- are nothing more than monuments to ignorance, incompetence, and ineptitude. Not one single claim about them — “easier”, “better for collaboration”, “saves you time” — holds water, and in almost every case amounts to at best people parroting propaganda just because they don’t know any better, and at worst nothing more than BALD FACED LIES!!!
jQuery used to be the posterchild for this, in the age before bootcrap stole the crown. Everything I’ve ever seen done with jQuery falls cleanly into one of three categories:
- Stuff that HTML and CSS don’t need JS’ assistance to do.
- Things that would have smaller, cleaner, and easier to understand codebases without the framework, without even counting the size of the framework against the total code size!
- Concepts that have zero blasted business on a website in the first place unless you REALLY don’t give a damn about usability, accessibility, ease of maintennance, security, and a slew of other “eye cans buildz teh wubsights” failings.
And that dates back to before many of the “features” it provides that are now — as you noted — were built into the language as it matures.
The same goes for other such mental midgetry like React, Vue, Angular, and so forth where the way most people use them it’s an instant WCAG violation — due to a lack of scripting off/blocked graceful degradation/functionality — and as such can get certain types of sites in legal woes under laws like the US ADA and UK EQA.
But worse in a lot of cases they teach bad practices, promote ignorance, and in the end make people write two to ten times the code needed to do the job.
How the bloody blue blazes is writing two to ten the times code, that relies on several hundred k of library crap, that adds something else on top of the underlying language to learn, “Easier”, “Simpler”, or “Better for collaboration”?!?
Again, it’s all LIES!!! All of these “frameworks” are built upon lies, ignorance, and wishful thinking; and those who mindlessly repeat these nonsensical false claims about how “great” they are? They’re either blindly repeating what they’ve been told about them, or flapping their arse cheeks in the wind.
Which is what often makes dealing with the fans of these systems feel more like dealing with cultists. Any sense of logic, reason, and thought has long since been washed from their minds.