> The simple alternative is just around the corner: sprinkle vanilla JavaScript where it’s needed and don’t build your identity around a framework. That mindset is hard to swallow, though (especially when companies have spent millions convincing developers their stack is the only way forward).

A few things to note here:

1. Given anything more complex than showing a blog post... eventually the complexity of your homebrew vanilla JS will grow until you re-invent React, but unlike React, your implementation hasn't had millions of users ironing out the kinks over well over a decade.

2. using an industry-standard framework makes developers fungible, and that is why companies push so hard for it. You need to develop something because marketing wants it, at best finished yesterday? Hire a freelancer, as long as you keep your code reasonable they won't have much onboarding time, and your own staff can pick up from there.

And that's not just valid for React, it's valid for a bunch more things. Wordpress comes to my mind first and foremost - yes it's PHP of questionable quality and with loads of legacy garbage, but even in the most remote outback village you'll be able to find some college kid doing wordpress stuff for local businesses as a side hustle. Symfony and Laravel for more complex applications. And for anything Java, there's a reason Spring + Tomcat have grown to where they are, it's just the same.