I think this is because the whole web dev knowledge ecosystem of youtubers and tutorial platforms is oriented around big frameworks and big tooling. People think it is much harder than it actually is to build without frameworks or build tools, or that the resulting web app will perform much worse than it actually will. A typical react codebase ported to a fully vanilla codebase ends up just as modular and around 1.5x the number of lines of code, and is tiny in total footprint due to the lack of dependencies so typically performs well.
To be clear though: I’m not arguing the dependencies are bad or don’t have any benefits at all or that vanilla coding is a superior way. Coding this way takes longer and the resulting codebase has more lines of code, and web components are “uglier” than framework components. What I’m saying is that most web developers are trapped in a mindset that these dependencies must be used when in reality they are optional and not always the best choice.
Come to think of it, I should write up the techniques I use, too...e.g. I have simple wrappers around querySelector() and createElement() with a bit of TypeScript gymnastics in a JSDoc annotation to add intellisense + type checking for custom elements.
Would you be open to a pull request with a page on static analysis/type checking for vanilla JS? (intro to JSDoc, useful patterns for custom elements, etc.) If not, that's totally OK, but I figure it could be interesting to readers of the site.
And agreed on vanilla/dependency-free not being a silver bullet. There aren't really one-size-fits-all solutions in software, but I've found a vanilla approach (and then adding dependencies only if/when necessary) tends to help the software evolve in a natural way and stay simple where possible.
Depending on the use case, minimizing dependancies can also decrease attack vectors on the page/app.