I agree with a lot of this criticism. Babel is a very gnarly beast and while it once served a very critical purpose, it's time to start sunsetting it again now that most browsers support modern JS.
As another alternative to React that's very lightweight and doesn't need much tooling, checkout Mithril[1] which is my go to for most personal projects. If you happen to really like JSX, you can use it with Mithril with ease, but you can avoid JSX entirely and use Mithril's very convenient built in alternative.
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I agree with a lot of this criticism. Babel is a very gnarly beast and while it once served a very critical purpose, it's time to start sunsetting it again now that most browsers support modern JS.
As another alternative to React that's very lightweight and doesn't need much tooling, checkout Mithril[1] which is my go to for most personal projects. If you happen to really like JSX, you can use it with Mithril with ease, but you can avoid JSX entirely and use Mithril's very convenient built in alternative.
[1]: https://mithril.js.org/