I love svelte. but now resorting to server rendered html pages with sprinkles of JS. shit I work on and I have noticed in the world doesn't really need frameworks like react, svelte, vue etc.
I ended up with Skeleton/jQuery for the front end and PHP Slim for the backend. This is a 5 page, 2 forms, site targeted at 100 people. There's no need to SPA this, npm that.
No rational person would advocate using Svelte or React for a static, one-off, informational site to be maintained by a single person.
In fact, you didn't even need jQuery at all. Vanilla JS works across browsers in a way that it didn't when you learned web coding 10 years ago.
Where frameworks become useful is for large projects that many people work on over a long period of time. Turnover is an issue for non-standardized code, as is poorly organized code.
And none of that even touches on security, which absolutely requires libraries, packages, and many of the other benefits of reusing the ecosystem that you seem to eschew.
This is where we disagree, and I think that's the problem. In my use case, I just wanted an HTML template file with at most a few CSS files. There's a dearth of those frameworks/templates compared to bigger packages.
> I ended up with Skeleton/jQuery for the front end
So rather than install a dependency via a package manager you installed it manually. Okay.
The whole point was that it's simple enough that I don't have to deal with a package manager, and a lot of projects don't need to.
To be honest, if you're going for "as simple as possible" there's no reason to use jQuery at all these days, it's a waste. Modern browsers have perfectly capable APIs!