Agreed - a huge benefit of Vue is exactly that - it's declarative. You describe what you want with a (more or less) plain ol' Javascript object, instead of how you want something to work. It's almost like writing JSON - and is just as readable.

It will certainly work, there are plenty of SPA which use jquery (or even vanilla JS) for their DOM manipulation. But it will likely be significantly more painful and prone to desync bugs than using a vdom-based system

Not just SPAs either, any non-trivial component is affected.

I built a simple site recently and one complex page ended up with shitty recreations of backbone Model and View.. and never knew until a colleague reviewed my code and suggested I look those up.

I've seen jQuery included in VueJS/react/ng2 for a specific complex plugin, and I've seen it for a few simple DOM manipulations where there was no reason for kQuery to do it instead of the framework, but is there actually a paradigm for jQuery being the root framework in an SPA? I've looked for jQuery SPA and found nothing. Does a jQuery SPA framework actually exist or are you talking about lots of homemade frameworks that use jQuery?

But the thing is we aren’t really building websites anymore. We are building web applications. And jquery just plain sucks for that.

With React, you can quite quickly stumble over performance bottlenecks in non-trivial app when you don't know what you are doing.

Especially on mobile devices.

The benefit that frameworks offer is exactly that structure that jQuery doesn't provide (and was never designed to provide). A long-lived SPA needs good structure. If you aren't good at understanding how to create it yourself a framework can save a LOT of work.

In my case I have looked at the underlying technology of front end web and it appears to be nothing fundamental. Rather, it's a series of historical accidents, mainly around trying to make a markup based, styled, document behave like an application. I find it hard to get motivated to learn that. According to the article, the likes of me would be better off using Vue or some equivalent.

Or Wix or Wordpress even.

But for someone who has taken the trouble to develop an in-depth knowledge of, and facility with, the underlying technologies (HTML, CSS and JS), front end development is not that difficult or mysterious. And for them, these frameworks make the process needlessly complex rather than simpler.

Preventing this is precisely what frameworks are for. A framework - a good one at least - provides a frame that has you code along guidelines (best practices, opinionated style devised by the framework creator etc.) and therefore prevents you from committing common mistakes.

Using a framework allows you to delegate low-level decisions to someone else, who - hopefully - is more knowledgeable than yourself in that area.