I wonder the same thing myself. Occasionally I look into these frameworks to see if they really add anything to the development of complex web applications vs. the amount of work they take to integrate them and it always heavily seems like a waste of time.

VueJS absolutely adds to the development of complex applications, and takes almost no time to set up.

Webpack... not so much. I've spent days fighting with webpack over nonsense.

I tried Vue because someone said the Chinese like it since they can use it without npm (great firewall & such), but everyone including Evan You stresses webpack and npm!

I've been successfully rolling it as an SPA without node/npm/webpack so far, but I'm wondering when the other boot is about to drop.

So why don't you do everything as GET/POST?

Because I was dumb enough to try React when enough people said "Oh, this changes everything!"

Whatever React gave, npm and Babel took right back.

I'm not sure how trying things makes a person dumb. Either way, that doesn't answer the question of what is stopping you from using the tools you prefer rather than the ones you despise.

I still have to maintain the product, unless I want to go full CADT and re-do it in something else.

GET/POST? Haven't you heard of GraphQL?! ;P