The JavaScript ecosystem’s gone to a strange place where dense frameworks and complex tooling are the status quo. But, there are data-points suggesting the pendulum could swing back sooner than later:
- Snowpack 2.0 - download all your deps, import them as modules. Snappy development experience ensues.
- lit-html - generate DOM without going through React/Vue/etc. intricacies
- Alpine.js - attach dynamic interactions to elements with data elements describing DOM manipulations
- htmx - attach dynamic networking to elements with data elements describing AJAX/Websocket/SSE events
Caveat: I haven't tried any of these. But, the trend-line is promising. JavaScript the language, while not perfect, is Pretty Good now. Perhaps the next few years will see the great ideas of the frameworks squeezed into more accessible, less sprawling expressions of those ideas.
