I am with you. Don't be embarrassed. I spent a lot of time looking at Vue, React and the others and frankly I don't see how the time and effort are worth it unless you work in a large firm that has a lot of developers working on a large project.

I use npm and node because it allows me to write local tools that I write to help me manage data and convert it. I have a lot of other tools that I have access to but I can thankfully access it via CodeKit on my Mac so I don't have to waste time installing and learning them all.