May sound like a terse question to compare results with ECMA vanilla and the flavorful ones. But the question arose during a discussion about creating website with minimal code. Here is what Gemini says:

It is entirely possible to build a website with vanilla JavaScript that achieves the same visual and functional results as a website built with Vue or React. Modern vanilla JavaScript, combined with browser APIs and Web Components, offers the tools to create dynamic and interactive user interfaces.

However, the ease of achieving those results and the maintainability of the codebase differ significantly, especially as project complexity increases:

• For simple websites or specific interactive elements, vanilla JavaScript can be straightforward and offer better performance due to fewer abstractions. You have direct control over the DOM and can optimize performance meticulously.

For complex single-page applications (SPAs) or highly interactive UIs with frequent state changes,

frameworks like Vue and React offer significant advantages:

Declarative UI: They allow you to describe what the UI should look like based on the application’s state, and the framework efficiently updates the DOM to reflect those changes. In vanilla JavaScript, you would manually manipulate the DOM, which can become cumbersome and error-prone for complex interactions.

Component-based architecture: Frameworks promote modularity and reusability through components, making it easier to manage and scale the codebase. While you can implement a component-like structure in vanilla JavaScript, frameworks provide built-in patterns and tools for this.

State management: Frameworks often include or integrate well with state management libraries (e.g., Redux for React, Vuex for Vue) that simplify handling complex application state, especially in large applications. In vanilla JavaScript, you would need to implement your own state management patterns.

Developer experience and ecosystem: Frameworks come with extensive documentation, large communities, and a wealth of tools, libraries, and best practices, which can accelerate development and make debugging easier.

In essence, while vanilla JavaScript provides the foundational capabilities, Vue and React provide a more structured and efficient approach to building complex web applications, abstracting away many of the manual DOM manipulation and state management tasks that can become challenging with vanilla JavaScript on larger projects. The “ease” largely depends on the scale and complexity of the project.

Image from https://blog.webix.com/vanillajs-vs-framework-when-using-js-libraries/