Well put — that lines up with how I see the ecosystem too. For small sites, vanilla JS is fine; once you move toward “app,” you either reach for a framework or start reinventing bits of one yourself.

dagger.js is basically me leaning into that middle ground: accept the verbosity/sharp edges of the DOM, but try to smooth just enough of them with directives (+click, +load, interpolation) so you don’t accidentally start building your own mini framework. It stays runtime-only, works directly with Web Components for composition, and tries not to hide what’s really happening under the hood.

So it’s not aiming to replace React/Angular, more to give people a lightweight option before they hit the point where those make sense.