It's funny you mention Mithril, because to me, that was the "minimum level of whiteness" box. I tried react fairly early, and when I did something wrong, it was completely unobvious to figure out by debugging the non-minimized code.

Mithril was sufficiently thin for me to drop into the debugger, say "oh, that's how it works" and fix.

I'll take a look at crank though. I do frontend dev only to make my hobby projects accessible to friends and family, so the less to remember, the better.