Having dependencies might not be a huge problem. But I've made some pretty complex interfaces using nothing but jquery, handlebars, and other util libraries. All patterns thought-out and written by myself. Not once did I feel I needed something more complex. I get the impression all the hype followers of front end frameworks might not have the best idea of what they're doing. Especially when you see people commenting about frameworks like angular/react/vue making jquery obsolete, because one is just a syntax enhancement library for dom manipulation, the others are predefined workflow patterns. I guess if you have to work on teams, or more corporate-y stuff, frameworks make sense, because programmers can be easily added or replaced. But luckily I've had the freedom to work on my own projects by myself, so I get the freedom to define whatever structure I see fit. Fun story: Somebody lectured me on how I should adapt my application to use one of those frameworks because it would reduce the code size according to him. Months later he complained about how he did just that with his application only to realize it made it more needlessly complicated and bloated.