I've been using vue just by adding the ref (no build tools) and I've been very happy with it. I'd like to see a good ClojureScript integration, then I'd go all in with a build step.
This. It is my impression that being in need of a relatively complex build system and sophisticated state management tools in order to quickly playing around with frontend interfaces will be regarded as a joke we'll all be frowning upon a couple of years from now.
This is exactly how I was using it too. Then I tried to move to the build version and all sorts of stuff broke. This was more than two years ago, but that turned off to it. Nowadays I use svelte.
I actually use the build tools for the first time a few weeks ago and it was quite a pleasure as well. I believe there have been some major updates to the tooling recently. I did a lot of prototyping there so I could use ES6 and .vue files and coverted them to templtes and/or js strings by hand when things were more finalized. I don't mind reading and touching up templates/strings, but it not super fun to start from scratch.