Why developers are returning to vanilla JavaScript — For years the industry defaulted to frameworks for everything. Now a quiet counter-movement is gaining momentum, driven by performance budgets, reduced complexity, and a renewed appreciation for the raw platform.
The Web Platform has caught up. Features like custom elements, the View Transitions API, CSS nesting, and the Popover API cover most of what developers used to reach for a framework to do. The result: smaller bundles, faster pages, and code that will still run in ten years without a migration.
This isn't anti-framework. It's pro-intentionality. Choosing vanilla where it fits and React where it doesn't is better engineering than defaulting to either.