@polotek@social.polotek.net I've found myself in an interesting place having worked on React and Angular projects at my last 2 jobs, but keeping close to standards and vanilla JS (or a minimal TS build system) in my personal web projects. If I'm not just building a static site I usually start by laying out a simple DOM and then starting that basic JS/TS stuff on top of that. I'm also learning web components, which is great and takes a lot of thunder from those frontend frameworks.

BTW I like your comment about actually digging into your current solutions to know them well so that you can actually start making decisions about how to change them. I had to do this recently when I reimplemented a test harness that another team broke when they upgraded the main framework. Throughout the teams, most people see the frontend build system and runtime libs as a black box, but we can't do that if we want to actually make improvements, we have to investigate what's actually going on.