Agreed that investing in standards is always a good bet. But at the same time, we have so many web frameworks in part because what is spec'd in plain JavaScript/HTML/CSS is not quite high-level enough to be really be a productive foundation just on its own. Going all the way back to raw `Document.createElement` will come with its own special pain.
With the WebComponents movement though, we are getting ever closer to being able to rely on native browser functionality for a good share of what frameworks set out to do. We're not all the way to bliss without frameworks, but for what it's worth here is my 481-byte library to support template interpolation with event binding in order to make WebComponents pretty workable mostly as-is: https://github.com/dchester/yhtml
With the WebComponents movement though, we are getting ever closer to being able to rely on native browser functionality for a good share of what frameworks set out to do. We're not all the way to bliss without frameworks, but for what it's worth here is my 481-byte library to support template interpolation with event binding in order to make WebComponents pretty workable mostly as-is: https://github.com/dchester/yhtml