At some point, there is an irreducible amount of complexity. At that point, adding things like over-wrought frameworks to “make things easier” for the developer ends up pushing the complexity around, like an air bubble trapped under a screen protector.
There's necessary complexity, and then there's extra complexity.
IMHO, a lot of frameworks just add extra complexity. Now that we're in the twenties, you don't need nearly the level of browser compatability shims like at the turn of the century. Sure, bleeding edge features need that, but most sites don't need any of that. Certainly news and shopping fit well enough with turn of the century browsers, so everything else is fluff (and retargetting, ugh).
It's the same with a lot of server side frameworks; especially PHP frameworks. I've never been able to grasp what a PHP framework can do that PHP can't, other than burn 50ms of cpu before outputting anything.
Yes, we now have what everyone fought for in the 00s - browser support for web standards - as well as full ES6 support yet here we are with front-end devs falling like flies from burnout. It's like CPU speed bumps - all we do is just invent more complexity to whittle away the gains we've made. Makes me just want to revert to procedural PHP and jQuery/vanailla JS.
