Having done back and and front end, I’m fully convinced that the frameworks are there only to help mediate a large team of developers all fiddling with the same codebase.
I haven’t been working on any sort of crazy features with elements moving around the page or excessive Ajax components (do they still call it that!?). On the other hand, most sites don’t have these features.
> Having done back and and front end, I’m fully convinced that the frameworks are there only to help mediate a large team of developers all fiddling with the same codebase.
I agree. A framework forces a shared consensus on how to solve a particular set of problems.
A single competent engineer on their own can make that consensus themselves. If the system is larger than a single competent engineer can manage, it seems intuitive that a small handful of engineers who are familiar with working with each other are less dependent on a framework for shared consensus.