With AI assistants now capable of writing plain, vanilla JavaScript and managing DOM manipulation, state, and even complex interactions without frameworks, I'm questioning whether we still need the React ecosystem. LLMs can generate pure HTML/CSS/JS that's often more performant, has zero dependencies, and is easier to debug.

Are we holding onto frameworks out of habit, or do they still provide genuine value that AI-generated vanilla code can't match? What are the real trade-offs here - beyond developer familiarity and existing tooling?

Curious to hear from those who've experimented with LLM-generated vanilla JS for production web apps versus traditional framework approaches.