I have had some really good results with Alpine.js and back-end templating for simpler apps (especially served from non-traditional embedded web servers). This base plus the combo of what kids these days call "vanilla JS" and whatever other libraries make sense has worked for me for small-to-medium complexity sites. It would easily grow to larger efforts as long as the team did. I think if my sites grew to need larger teams, there would be some value in using frameworks other people have used; this basically means "match the big guys" to make brainpower a little more fungible, even if the tools aren't perfect for the job.