React gets a bad rap because of all the rubbish built around it, but if you do ever want to try the declarative model over vanilla/jQuery, React is actually exactly what you want if you want to avoid compile time magic. The only thing happening at compile time with React is a line-for-line swap from JSX tags:
<foo bar="baz">{boop}</foo>
to a createElement function call:
React.createElement("foo", { bar: "baz" }, ...boop);
Other than that it's entirely Javascript. No templates, computed/derived values or any of that other bullshit. You could probably implement the compile step in like 5 lines of code.
I've built big projects in Vue and find it almost impossible to find a reason to use it. Svelte looks cut from the same cloth. They just fundamentally have the wrong approach.