A decision memo for anyone staring at their package.json and wondering.
Most arguments for leaving your SPA framework center on the upgrade treadmill — the endless cycle of major-version migrations, dependency churn, and build-tool turnover. That argument is real but incomplete, and on its own it has never been decisive: every framework shop has learned to live with the treadmill. There's a stronger case, built on four pillars that compound with each other.
First, total cost of ownership: vanilla JavaScript on the web platform has unusual TCO properties, dominated by a depreciation curve that is nearly flat. Code written against the platform does not rot, because its substrate does not change. Over long horizons, this single property outweighs almost every per-feature productivity argument in a framework's favor.
Second, the labor market: the pool of people who can work on vanilla JavaScript is not a niche within the frontend market — it is the entire frontend market, plus most of the backend market. Every framework developer is, underneath, a JavaScript developer. The reverse is not true. If you hire for a specific framework, you're hiring from a subset while telling yourself you're hiring from the mainstream.
