Why one developer built a full SaaS app in vanilla JS with no framework

Guseyn recounts a year spent building instruxmusic.com—a fairly complex business tool for music schools with scheduling, invoicing, video lessons, file sharing, a landing-page builder, and a booking system—entirely in vanilla JavaScript using native Web Components, no framework. He frames the piece for developers worn down by what he calls the artificial complexity of modern web development.

His core argument is that the browser engine already handles caching, forms, navigation, events, and DOM management, so the major frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, Svelte) mostly reinvent capabilities that ship natively—while taking control away from the developer. He singles out reactivity as a concept that ‘brainwashed a generation,’ and criticizes the ecosystem’s insistence on build pipelines, TypeScript, wrapped event listeners, isolated component state, and third-party state managers. He extends the complaint to the sprawling list of HTML templating engines, CSS preprocessors, and JS-transpiling languages invented to avoid writing plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, arguing SSR similarly breaks native browser behavior.

To the standard rebuttal that vanilla JS lacks structure and doesn’t scale, he concedes it can be messy but blames 20 years of abstraction-building over problem-solving. His answer is two of his own open-source tools: EHTML, which turns HTML into a templating layer that reacts only to real DOM insertions, and e-ui, a Web Components design system (toasts, dialogs, uploaders, etc.). He positions these as solving concrete gaps—JSON-aware forms, HTML caching for SPA-like navigation, import maps for organization—without new languages, transpilers, or build steps, and claims the approach scales well and needs far less AI token spend. The post closes noting he’s seeking a new contract.