I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Y'all know React and Vue frameworks still use HTML, CSS, and JS, right? We're using the same thing, with a thin layer of helpers around mounting components and managing their lifetimes...

As culi also touches on I think it depends on what is meant by frameworks. As someone who belives abstraction are horrible practice unless they serve a really good purpose though, I never bought the "this is easier" part of the big CSS frameworks. I fully accept that people who work on user facing web applications more than I do, which is rarely, had a much easier time using something like bootstrap/tailwind/whatever. I always found having to look up documentation on something wich was infinitely worse than the CSS documentation on developer.mozilla.org to be a a weird experience. I do fully accept that a lot of teams experiences would prove my personal opinions wrong on this.

On the flip-side I always found javascript frameworks to have a purpose. Though to be fair I don't think I've worked with user facing javascript without a framework since jquery came about. I guess you could call that a library, but still.

I don’t disagree with you and I lurve frameworks. Yes, I love react. It is so awesome.

But it is SO nice to not have any build step. All of my new projects start as a single babashka script now. You got html templating, throw in a stylesheet. Slap a datastar script tag in there for everything else. It’s just easy peasy.

People who use css-as-an-object type of frameworks or tailwind don't really get to experience what writing CSS is like. styled-components or Linaria or Emotion do though ofc

OP might be referring to using React together with a UI library that comes with elements like <Grid>, instead of using just React + CSS grid.

Think layer? Like a page loading 6MB of crap to show 0.5KB of text?

Except that with React you usually use something like tailwind or similar that abstracts writing CSS, that do me doesn't make sense.

Of course you can still write plain CSS.