July 12, 2026
Frameworks? In this economy?
Why Vanilla JavaScript
One coder ditched trendy tools, and the comments turned it into a full-on web war
TLDR: A developer says he built a full business app using plain JavaScript instead of popular web toolkits, arguing modern tools create unnecessary hassle. The comments split fast: some cheered the back-to-basics rebellion, while others warned that going your own way is great fun until a bigger team has to live with it.
A developer behind Instrux Music just walked into one of tech’s messiest family arguments and cheerfully lit a match: he says he built a surprisingly feature-packed app in plain JavaScript, skipping the big trendy toolkits entirely. We’re talking scheduling, billing, video lessons, file sharing, booking pages, dashboards—the works. His big claim? Modern web development has piled on artificial complexity, and regular browser tools are already powerful enough for a lot more than people admit.
The comments, of course, instantly became the real show. One camp was basically nodding so hard they nearly fell out of their chairs. Several readers said this hit painfully close to home, arguing that popular tools often start helpful and end in oceans of boilerplate, weird rules, and custom language that feels like homework. One commenter dropped the line that the browser is already the framework, which is exactly the kind of quote that starts fights at developer lunch tables.
But there was also a deliciously skeptical side-eye. One reader called this kind of approach “fun programming,” praising the idea while hinting it may not scale so nicely when real teams and long-term maintenance enter the chat. Another joked that maybe complaints about JavaScript itself have gone down because everyone is too busy arguing about large language models and typed JavaScript now. The vibe? Half rebellion, half therapy session, with a side of “I built my own thing and it actually works.”
Key Points
- •The author says they spent the last year building instruxmusic.com, a web application for music schools and independent instructors.
- •The application includes scheduling, billing, automated invoicing, video chat, messaging, file sharing, booking, dashboards, and organization management features.
- •The author states that the entire application was built in vanilla JavaScript using Web Components.
- •The article identifies React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte as major frontend framework options in the current market.
- •The article argues that modern frameworks commonly involve build pipelines, often encourage TypeScript, and are tied to the rise of reactive programming traced to Angular.js and later React.