The time you spend "painstakingly" evaluating and testing libraries is much, much less than the time spent painstakingly trying to do something in the way that the framework forces you to do it.

Using a framework is optimizing for the first few months of development and shooting yourself in the foot later on. That especially includes the time spent either finding devs who are very competent with the framework or training someone.

If you just use libraries properly, you can hire anyone (even someone who doesn't know the language at all) and just throw them into the code base. They can follow the code and actually understand it without googling every 2 minutes. There's no magic.

Have you tried both approaches long-term on multiple projects? If you haven't, how can you know that frameworkless is more work?