While I can understand how bloated frontend frameworks can be, I do not agree with the idea for frontend to become some kind of thin client of whatever backend renders.

The sweet spot is to communicate via APIs as this is the most efficient from bandwidth point of view.

This also means, that frontend concerns like rendering content, layout and widgets is justified. There is no way back to page-reloading style, as the best UX can’t be achieved without pages, that update themselves consistently to reflect user input (this is the main point of SPA). Also there are cases where the whole application can work “offline”, so there is a genuine need to have scripting on the client-side.

And given the need, frameworks necessarily arise, because framework is one of the ways to handle complexity (it does not matter whether they are 3rd party or in-house). Completely ad hoc code organization works only up to certain level of project complexity.

This means Angular, React, Bootstrap, etc are fulfilling an objective need, and are not just some fancy add-on where the alternative is to write it all in pure JavaScript.

I do not believe code re-use denial is the point (it’s not very wise not to use what has been written before if it fits), thus I do not understand how npm can be a problem.