I've been doing FE development on and off since IE5/6, starting out with pure JS and Ajax, and in my opinion the modern FE developer experience using the major frameworks is a generational improvement over the messes we used to write. There are still frustrations, but it's a lot better than it used to be.

Browser API's and CSS have all improved drastically since then, so pure JS and Ajax isn't as bad. I still avoid frameworks for small things just to keep pages lightweight. But for heavyweight projects, if you don't use an established framework, you just end up with a shitty home-grown framework anyway, because the alternative, teams of developers working on the same site with no frameworks, is even worse.