At work we are building a simple CRUD admin with Jekyll and Vue as a jQuery replacement. No babel, no webpack, no router, no Vuex. The complexity has been reduced immensely.

Data still comes from an API, so the front end is still decoupled from the back end, and anyone that is not a JS ninja can still contribute to the codebase since the project structure is really simple.

This is an internal project so we can tell our users to use latest Chrome to avoid transpiling and such, but configuring webpack would still be possible.

I really recommend the approach.

A lot of people think getting the data from an API automatically means building a single-page-application while in fact you could use this approach with Jekyll to create a static site, or even use server side code to generate dynamic markup and still consume an API.