> But you cannot really develop anything meaningful without adding frameworks.

You can develop extremely powerful web-apps using just React + Redux. Once you need to start dealing with SSR for SEO & server side caching, data preloading, hydration, etc... things get complex.

But honestly that's because those concepts are inherently complex and that complexity can only be reduced so far. Another problem is they get baked into these framework as the "default" and often over utilized when they aren't actually needed.