I strongly disagree after writing JS full time, and as a hobby, for 15 years. Normally when people argue against vanilla JS it’s because they never learned to write original applications (in any language), or if they are in management it’s just more expedient to churn through employees than train them to program.

Either way the OP has to both learn and deliver a product in a short time frame. It just makes more sense to cut out all the unnecessary bullshit developers use to compensate with.

IMO neither one is necessarily better; they're just different levels of abstraction. React lets you think and work in components more easily. Vanilla has a much closer to the metal events and interactivity model.

I think it's way quicker to put out a MVP with a good UI framework (something like MUI or Chakra or Ant) than to spend a lot of time building up primitives from scratch.

It's like the difference between writing Visual Basic and C++ or whatever. Different use cases.

Without knowing what the OP is actually trying to build, it's hard to say what's more suitable.

I wouldn't necessarily default to vanilla OR React. It really just depends.

what kind of take is this, what do you think react was made with? if react isnt used anymore does your skillset translate?

I'm not going to learn assembly to program in c, and especially not as a beginner.

JavaScript is not assembly. It’s like saying I am not going to learn the rules of driving before driving a car because I’m just a driver, not a lawyer.

I was in that line of work long enough and have heard that false analogy enough to know that it’s people pretending to be arrogant to distract from their stupidity. Rephrased its really just: I shouldn’t have to form of whining because they never learned in the first place and are embarrassed by what super beginner things they absolutely cannot do.

are you never gonna write js inside a react component?