So good to find someone else who went back to the 90ies stack!
After playing around with some react/vue/express/angular/younameit apps for various clients I am more than happy to escape the dependency hell and write efficient code in pure JS that load basically instantly and doesn't need a build environment in the first place. The last straw for me was spending over a day trying to find the right versions for node and all the packages involved to at least get a "legacy app" I inherited running.
I find that I don't even need jQuery anymore, support for things like closest() or a simple document.querySelector is so good that I save those few kb as well.
I'm doing this as well, mostly. It's surprisingly productive! I don't use jQuery or anything like that either. For DOM manipulation I've got a little utility module that I'll include in projects. I know what every function does and it's mostly just some convenience wrappers around standard APIs, I have maybe 15-20 functions in total and I don't think any one of them is longer than 20 lines (including comments and white space.)
I've written some reasonably complex apps this way, but I'd probably have a hard time selling this approach to fellow devs, most I've worked with are very entrenched in <insert favorite framework here> and not particularly keen on doing things differently. I can understand and appreciate that point of view, and will acquiesce to the will of the team, but in the past year or so I've had the luxury of being the sole dev on most of the projects I've worked on so this is what I've done and it's been wonderful.
F5 is my compiler, it requires no additional configuration beyond what's already in the HTML, and it's super fast. I love it! :o)
After playing around with some react/vue/express/angular/younameit apps for various clients I am more than happy to escape the dependency hell and write efficient code in pure JS that load basically instantly and doesn't need a build environment in the first place. The last straw for me was spending over a day trying to find the right versions for node and all the packages involved to at least get a "legacy app" I inherited running.
I find that I don't even need jQuery anymore, support for things like closest() or a simple document.querySelector is so good that I save those few kb as well.