I would try to think of it from a first-principles approach. You can begin with a blank slate, for instance, a single HTML file with a <script> tag. Only when "doing it yourself" becomes tedious do you start to look for libraries to solve your problem.

Personally, I find a bare minimum of tooling to be valuable. I have built SPAs using 100% vanilla JS, and it can be quite repetitive and error-prone. I'd recommend using highly simple build tooling (maybe Brunch) and an extremely simple view layer like https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom. Pretty much everything else you can build yourself with surprisingly few lines of code -- state management, routing, event handling, data bindings, etc. I think of it as "building your own framework", and although you might not want to do it for every project, the learning experience is great.