Many other people have written about this, so I'll keep it short.
It's quick and easy to get started with frameworks, but you inevitably try to do something that's very difficult to figure out how to do. Instead of just writing code that does it, you have to search the docs of the framework to figure out how to do it the way the framework wants.
But guess what? The framework can't/doesn't have infinite documentation, so they often don't tell you how to do it.
You end up reading docs more than writing code.
Frameworks are also complicated and full of magic. You have to know the language, but then you also have to learn the framework. You usually can't just read the code to understand how the app works.
> How have you found the process of going framework-free?
Amazing. I'll never go back.