This is pretty much it, tbh. Every time one of these types of threads pop up you get a bunch of people commenting about how broken the web is and how it sucks because front end devs aren't real devs or something, and it's immediately clear to me that none of them have done any serious work on a modern website.

The problem is a business/orgnanizational problem - it's not like developers are incapable of mimicking their own websites with pure html+css+js (especially with all the improvements to JS and the browser apis over the years), it's that doing that and then maintaining and growing it with a team of people is basically impossible at any useful scale.

Frameworks provide a common language for teams to build their site with. The fact that they also currently introduce a lot of extra complexity that require developers to handle previously "free" things (ex. performance, bundle splitting) isn't some fundamental flaw with the idea of frameworks, it's just a result of people still trying to figure out exactly how the hell you can provide a nice, interactive site with all the bells and whistles that'll make like 5 different groups of stake holders happy.