I work on a site that was built without frameworks with just a sprinkle of jQuery on top of a …

Nailed it. And a lot of people who say "this sounds like an application, let's pick an application framework to use" from the start are people who have experienced what you're currently experiencing. But it's very hard to describe in a compelling way to someone who has never had the same experience.

I agree with you about the customer-facing issues which occur with vanilla sites which don't deliver good user experience. However, I'm interested in how frameworks solve the developer experience problem you mentioned: > Will this javascript file you touched affect only the feature you wanted, or another 50 pages you didn’t even know about? > When you add a new thing in a template, how many N+1 issues across how many pages did you just cause? > Where does the data even get loaded?? Doesn't this just change into - "Will changing this React component affect only the feature I want, or do other pages interact with it differently?" - "When adding a new component into a template, will I break any other pages which use this template?" - "Where does the data even get loaded??"

I think I will never understand, how people write their code in such a messy unorganized way, that it becomes unclear, whether touching some piece of code changes the behavior on 50 other pages. To me that reeks of badly structured code, with bad abstraction layers, perhaps stuffing too much stuff into a single module or, if the language is still backward and doesn't have modules, a file. Especially for websites, the path to rendering a page should be pretty clear. Have some weird JS requiring menu functionality? Well ... put it in "menu.js". Will it affect 50 other pages? No, it will affect the menu. Or yes, if you count the menu as part of those pages. Have some video player stuff? Well it is going to affect all pages where there is the video player. Something for forms? All pages where you have such forms. Then there are things like maybe animations or checkbox states. But I fail to c…

>A good example are pages that take 5 seconds to load because they have to do so much, then you submit a form, and the page reload takes 5 seconds to go through but there is no UI feedback so you press the button a few more times because maybe it didn’t work? Then you get an error because the first action worked but the subsequent actions failed due to uniqueness constraints. It's been standard practice for at least 25 years to disable the submit button once it is pressed. If you aren't doing this as a developer, you are practically begging for trouble, and it's really so easy to avoid that trouble.

I’d approach this with a wizard-style (step by step) interface and transactions—orthogonal to JS framework.