I was once working on a small tool that I tried different iterations of using a small variety of approaches; I tried implementing it in bash, perl, python, ES6 JS (classes and more), and a few other methods (I think at one point I even tried a LibreOffice spreadsheet).
But I kept getting mired and "stuck" in how I should architect things, or what framework to use, or this or that. I eventually decided that I wanted it to be a browser-based app of some sort (thus the road of ES6) - but then I started to wonder what tooling to use there. Lots of questions, etc - and I never got that far with it.
I eventually wised up and realized that it didn't matter what I chose - what I needed was the application to work. Who cares about frameworks, requirejs, css frameworks, etc - I just wanted something working. So I stepped back...and decided to chuck all of that away.
I ended up with a basic webpage, with a script tag and the code inside that - nothing fancy, purely procedural, old-school javascript functions, tied to events. Bare bones, basic.
...and I made real progress for the first time.
Basically, by regressing to the relative simplicity of Javascript back from the 1990s, I was able to get my tool finally going, without having to worry about the last two decades of cruft around that language. Now, I could have also done it using Python or anything else, in the same manner - but again, I wanted it to be browser based.
As you note, my own journey, and not something I'd tell anyone else to do (and certainly not something meant for a production environment!) - but for myself, and my need, this fit the bill. I'm still working on it; I figure when I complete it proper-like, I can go back and refactor it to something more respectable. Or maybe not.
After all, if it works, why try to break it? In the end, I want the results from the tool - who cares what it looks like under the hood, so long as it works.
So good to find someone else who went back to the 90ies stack!
After playing around with some react/vue/express/angular/younameit apps for various clients I am more than happy to escape the dependency hell and write efficient code in pure JS that load basically instantly and doesn't need a build environment in the first place. The last straw for me was spending over a day trying to find the right versions for node and all the packages involved to at least get a "legacy app" I inherited running.
I find that I don't even need jQuery anymore, support for things like closest() or a simple document.querySelector is so good that I save those few kb as well.
I'm doing this as well, mostly. It's surprisingly productive! I don't use jQuery or anything like that either. For DOM manipulation I've got a little utility module that I'll include in projects. I know what every function does and it's mostly just some convenience wrappers around standard APIs, I have maybe 15-20 functions in total and I don't think any one of them is longer than 20 lines (including comments and white space.)
I've written some reasonably complex apps this way, but I'd probably have a hard time selling this approach to fellow devs, most I've worked with are very entrenched in <insert favorite framework here> and not particularly keen on doing things differently. I can understand and appreciate that point of view, and will acquiesce to the will of the team, but in the past year or so I've had the luxury of being the sole dev on most of the projects I've worked on so this is what I've done and it's been wonderful.
F5 is my compiler, it requires no additional configuration beyond what's already in the HTML, and it's super fast. I love it! :o)
But I kept getting mired and "stuck" in how I should architect things, or what framework to use, or this or that. I eventually decided that I wanted it to be a browser-based app of some sort (thus the road of ES6) - but then I started to wonder what tooling to use there. Lots of questions, etc - and I never got that far with it.
I eventually wised up and realized that it didn't matter what I chose - what I needed was the application to work. Who cares about frameworks, requirejs, css frameworks, etc - I just wanted something working. So I stepped back...and decided to chuck all of that away.
I ended up with a basic webpage, with a script tag and the code inside that - nothing fancy, purely procedural, old-school javascript functions, tied to events. Bare bones, basic.
...and I made real progress for the first time.
Basically, by regressing to the relative simplicity of Javascript back from the 1990s, I was able to get my tool finally going, without having to worry about the last two decades of cruft around that language. Now, I could have also done it using Python or anything else, in the same manner - but again, I wanted it to be browser based.
As you note, my own journey, and not something I'd tell anyone else to do (and certainly not something meant for a production environment!) - but for myself, and my need, this fit the bill. I'm still working on it; I figure when I complete it proper-like, I can go back and refactor it to something more respectable. Or maybe not.
After all, if it works, why try to break it? In the end, I want the results from the tool - who cares what it looks like under the hood, so long as it works.