If you don't like the complexity all that tooling and boilerplate adds to your project, why not just write your application in vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript? It still works fine.
Most of the time I'd much rather work with imperfect but standard tools than waste time learning the "hot new stuff" and constantly fix what flighty other developers break or abandon. Framework churn is a symptom of invented problems that don't need solving.
It would be helpful to quantify "sucks" in there. Otherwise it's simply an opinion. As an exercise, just write your own XMLHttpRequest interface. It will take you about 20 lines or less, even doing it in the most naive way. I'm serious, go do this. It will make anyone a better developer.
Frameworks rarely give you much for all the baggage that comes with it. I say this as an angular user specifically, but I haven't used any others that don't have this problem.
It might, MIGHT, be that these standard setups suck, but if they do, adding a complicated toolchain without a reason doesn't seem like a very pragmatic approach to why the suck or how to fix them.
I wrote my own XMLHttp interface several times back before jquery came out thanks. No, it's not useful writing one, I know because I was there back in the IE6 days.
My point was simple, if it didn't suck, there wouldn't be all these workarounds, shims, essential libraries that every website uses, half bastardised coffee/live/closure/whatever scripts, gulps, glubs, and 1500 different templating languages.
For the last couple of projects I've worked on, I've had to choose:
- The scaffold
- The build tool
- The actually-good language variant that compiles to JS that a browser can run
- The tool that makes the build tool work with the scaffold
- The tool that makes the build tool work with the language variant
And by the time I make any progress, one of those has made a compatibility-breaking update, or even been abandoned and replaced by something better.
Great that things keep getting better, but at some point I want to get off the ride.