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.