I have a lot of "framework free" single-developer projects as well (such as https://bongo.to ), but that isn't really what I think we are talking about here. Single developer projects can do whatever they want, it isn't a problem. The problem comes when you have to work with distributed teams, juniors, etc. One way or another a large team still has to come to agreements about how to do things, and without an external reference it will have to be made up in an ad-hoc manner instead. This often leads to issues, many of us have noticed.
The claim upthread was that you couldn't make a web app at all without a framework ("or it would just be a document"). I said yes you can and the goalposts shifted to: sure, but only "brochure-ware" (referring to simple unambitious projects). I show an ambitious interactive project made without a framework and now the goalposts are moving to: sure, but large distributed teams couldn't work like this? You know, this solo project is more ambitious than 99% of the projects I work on at my actual work. You know, projects that have 10, 40, or 100 devs working on it.
I absoluetly agree with your sentiment, and furthermore in projects as large and mature as mine, with 500K LOC (about maybe 30% in TypeScript) lots of times I simply cannot remember enough about my code to effectively refactor it from memory without type safety (to check me) and IDE refactoring to DO the refactoring.
I mean if I need to change a variable name in a class or something, unless it's a perfectly unique name (easily searchable), it would take me hours to do in JS what I can do in 4 seconds with TypeScript.
