This is absolutely true, however there are some newer tools that are appearing that make this much easer with vanilla html - htmx, hyperscript, alpine.js for example (links below).

These newer tools are all made possible due to the “new”(ish) MutationObserver api, it allows you to intercept new dom elements being placed into the document. These libraries let you simple decorate your “real” html with extra attributes enabling easer client side state management. No build step required.

My hope is that a combination of these type of tools, js modules and web components will result in dropping all js build tools. With http2/3 we don’t really need bundling. In many ways it the bundling and transpiling process that has contributed the most to the friction with JS development.

My other observation would be that as js frameworks have evolved they have become more “enterprise” ready, adding tooling (complex central state management, strict typing) to make working in large teams on very large codebases easer. Much of this isn’t really necessary for the majority of we development.

https://htmx.org/

https://hyperscript.org/

https://alpinejs.dev/