People also said this when HTML5 was on the rise—pure JS, no runtime but the browser! Of course, it turns out engineering DOM-manipulating applications in a responsive way is really hard.

These are the core benefits of frameworks:

1. Standard code style.

2. There's only one way to do it (ideally).

3. Modularization.

4. Unit testing.

5. A realistic standard library for async/concurrent computation.

Angular, for instance, provides dependency injection and $scope/$digest. It would be pretty ridiculous to attempt to replicate those benefits until AT THE VERY LEAST Object.observe has solidified in terms of support. And even then, you're on your own in terms of mocking, in terms of communication between different modules, in terms of libraries you can drop in without dragging in a framework itself.

I'm appreciative of the attitude, but it's quite simply not a reality for people who don't want to invest in establishing their own patterns—in effect, writing a framework. With a framework, people can sit down and use the engineering techniques they've learned from other areas of CS and write an application without being bogged down in terms of figuring out how to write a high-performance single-threaded web app in a language without modules, integers, futures (or other similar async abstractions), calendar widgets.

Try going without JQuery for a day and see how much duplicate code you write.

Then, multiply yourself times a team of 10.... good luck.