Vite is a “bundler”, a dev/build tool. You can vanilla js with it as usual. It takes your index.html and sucks in a whole dependency tree to shake it and either produce a production bundle or run a dev server. Being aware of ts, vue, react, sass, etc out of box is its bonus points.
Vite vs React vs Next is crates vs oranges vs boxed oranges.
I know react but never touch it. React, vue, svelte are “state management”. I’m using mithril.js with POJOs for my frontends.
Vanilla everything gets messy in interactive apps, and I come up with a poor man’s mithril usually, then rewrite for it.