We're talking about a framework here, not a programming language. I don't think the above poster's assessment about the amount of files needed for hello world offers a charitable conclusion either, given frameworks are not languages. The same file usage would apply to many other popular 'heavy' opinionated frameworks.

My point is, nobody writes Hello World webapps for a living. The number of lines or files is irrelevant. There is precisely zero value in this metric.

Sorry, I misread your comment.

There’s a grain of truth in that thought. First impressions matter, frameworks aren’t exempt from that basic psychological fact. If you treat ’complexity of hello world’ as a proxy for learning curve steepness (again, people do things like that subconsciously), you may end with a very wrong assessment very early. It’ll probably tell more about the assessor than the framework but it’s a real risk.

Indeed - if my goal is a minimal Hello, World, I don't even need javascript, I can put "Hello World" in a text file and name it index.html.

Problem is, this doesn't lead me to solve any harder problems.