> Not sure what type of sites you're building on the web, but building nontrivial feature-rich web applications does not scale well with vanilla JS. Frameworks like React and Angular give you the power to manage state,

I disagree. It's extraordinarily trivial. Managing state is as simple as changing the value in a settings object as the user interacts with a control on the page and then saving that object so that when the page is reloaded there is known restore point by which all controls are repopulated and in the condition from which they were left. In my current personal project I am synchronously sending the state object to a Node instance that writes it to a file so that state is restored cross-browser and cross-computer.

These are beginner things. The only reason why many developers even pretend they are vaguely more challenging than copy/paste is because they have never written this logic themselves.

I am tired of being stuck, at work, in perpetual beginner land with developers who are intimidated to write 3 lines of code without 3mb of framework to tell them how its done. It isn't because these other developers lack the intelligence or capabilities to write original code. It is because the social state of development encourages them not. Here are some reasons why:

Many developers college educated UI developers I have worked with prefer to toggle configurations instead of writing original logic, even trivial logic. This is what they were taught in school and this how they were prepared for the real world. This is bad design. Playing around with configurations wastes people time. A better approach is to simply supply a working default state for any conceivable configuration and a point of automation to supplying changes to options.

As I have mentioned several times already in just this comment most UI developers I have worked with are deathly afraid of writing original code. This isn't because they are incompetent or incapable. It is primarily due to social reinforcement where any locally crafted software is inherently untrusted compared to equivalent code written by a stranger from some untested external package. I have experience this myself when a colleague adamantly told me to use some software in preference to the current office approach from outside the company not realizing I wrote a good porting of the software he was recommending. This social state is so prolific it even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

Developers also go way out of their way to reinforce much of this irrationality by offering simple cliches in their defense. The most common are:

* Writing a web application is too hard to scale without some framework to do it for me

* Reinventing the wheel

* The DOM is too slow (implying that somehow a framework makes it faster)

There is no evidence behind any of those points, but there is plenty of evidence and examples to the contrary. Its irrational nonsense that people use to reinforce bad ideas shared by their peers. I am no longer interested in working along side that lack of evidence-based critical reasoning and fear of originality.

If this means dismissing many potential employment opportunities then so be it. I would rather find a rare better fit than desperately settling for something so unambitious.