When you are writing some complex web app, you will wish you used a framework. Some web apps can have more than 50 pages with multiple states that depend on remote data to be locally cached and synced depending if you are online/offline. Framework can handle a lot of the heavy state management for you and even provide a nice UI component library. But I do agree that React is too much, but jQuery is being replaced by vanilla JS. That is why I usually use Vue. But for simple stuff, yes, Vanilla JS is pretty much good enough