My experience is completely the opposite. I used to wire together a bunch of jQuery spaghetti code but as my front end applications became more and more complicated it became massively unmaintainable. Probably due to the fact that I didn't organize things very well, but isn't that what a framework is supposed to do - give you guidelines for how to organize things?

You can keep manually updating the DOM every time you get data back from the server but if you don't mind I'll keep using frameworks like Angular that take care of those mundane details for me while giving me a sane way to help me organize and test my front-end application.