I think the conventional dogma that one must resort to a framework for a large web app is wrong.

Your assumption that simpler is more "hacky" or less efficient, just isn't true. One can use built-in constructs like for loops in vanilla JS to update multiple DOM nodes at once, this yields the most optimal performance. Or one could use React/Redux and setup an action and a reducer and action creator and action type constant and... you see where this is going.