They were created to manage complexity of building web applications. So something more like Excel than something like dummy photos gallery.
One still can simply drop html file and sprinkle it with jQuery.
One still can simply drop html file and sprinkle it with jQuery.
The real promise of these is web forms with a little interactivity. Anything more complex and you start to fight with it to drop back down to the level where it’s manageable.
It’s the fighting with it that’s the issue; my experience is that a lot of devs go in to “force this stupid framework to work” mode and blow up tasks that should be 10 lines of code with no edge cases into 50 or 100 which “mostly works, good enough.”
React is by far the most adopted framework for desktop-level or near-desktop-level web applications.