I have been writing recently an application in plain "vanilla" TypeScript with vite, no rendering libraries, just old-style DOM manipulation and I have to say I more and more question front end "best" practices.

I can't conclude it scales, whatever it means, but I can conclude that there are huge benefits performance-wise, it's fun, teaches you a lot, debugging is simple, understanding the architecture is trivial, you don't need a PhD into "insert this rendering/memoization/etc" technique.

Templating is the thing I miss most, I'm writing a small vite plugin to handle it.

I take it a step further and go no-build js with jsdoc.

The hardest part about scaling this approach is finding UX designers who understand the web. Just as frontend devs have trained themselves to "think in react" over the past decade, so have designers. The understanding of the underlying capabilities and philosophies of the web have been lost to the idea that the web and mobile can be effectively the same thing.

This approach can go far if the team using it knows and respect web technology.

If you look at it as a tradeoff space it makes more sense why the majority of folks are on some kind of react. What kind of problems do you want to experience and have to solve in a production setting?

The problems with this approach are exacerbated in a team setting. The architecture might be trivial from your perspective but good luck getting a bunch of other folks on board with different mental models and levels of experience.

I get what you’re saying but people still write SPAs

Can you elaborate on website functionality, team size, and production readiness?

I mean I totally agree on small personal projects. Thats just never the limiting factor though.

"I can also ditch a database and just dump everything into a text file." <- This is what you're saying. It isn't hard to see the problem with this kind of thing.