It would be helpful to quantify "sucks" in there. Otherwise it's simply an opinion. As an exercise, just write your own XMLHttpRequest interface. It will take you about 20 lines or less, even doing it in the most naive way. I'm serious, go do this. It will make anyone a better developer.

Frameworks rarely give you much for all the baggage that comes with it. I say this as an angular user specifically, but I haven't used any others that don't have this problem.

It might, MIGHT, be that these standard setups suck, but if they do, adding a complicated toolchain without a reason doesn't seem like a very pragmatic approach to why the suck or how to fix them.

I wrote my own XMLHttp interface several times back before jquery came out thanks. No, it's not useful writing one, I know because I was there back in the IE6 days.

My point was simple, if it didn't suck, there wouldn't be all these workarounds, shims, essential libraries that every website uses, half bastardised coffee/live/closure/whatever scripts, gulps, glubs, and 1500 different templating languages.

And last but not least, the benefits that using a compiler provides.