For one project I worked on, I used a combination of Jquery and HandleBarsJs. It was a great combination and pretty clean. I attached events to the rendered template items, then changed the datamodel as appropriate and rerendered the template.

I didn’t (and still don’t) know any of the $cool_kids front end frameworks. But it couldn’t have been a SPA anyway. Each of the pages were created by a CMS that ran on the web and in a native mobile app that had to be able to work offline.