[thex10]

Many apps with moderate interactivity don’t need thousands of lines of JavaScript. And using a backend framework for templating is not mutually exclusive to using a JS build system for helping transpile files and purge CSS and such.

[muspimerol]

> Many apps with moderate interactivity don’t need thousands of lines of JavaScript.

I mean, maybe? Depends what you mean by "many". I'm certainly not advocating for adding JS & frameworks where interactivity is not needed, and as I mentioned, for less than a couple thousand lines, an SPA framework is almost definitely the wrong choice. But my experience in the last 10 years is that very few projects do not grow to the point of requiring quite a bit of JS for interactivity. Async requests, complex client-side form validation, comboboxes, dynamic modals/content previews, showing/hiding long content, 3rd party integrations... these sorts of requirements are in nearly every app these days. And the HTML/CSS only solutions are just not good enough yet, unfortunately.

> And using a backend framework for templating is not mutually exclusive to using a JS build system for helping transpile files and purge CSS and such.

Sure, but at this point, why are you avoiding introducing a JS framework? All that stuff is built in to most JS frameworks (but not backend frameworks). You could piece it together yourself... but for what benefit?