Frameworks Rot. The Platform Doesn't.

A decision memo for anyone staring at their package.json and wondering. Most arguments for leaving your SPA framework center on the upgrade treadmill — the endless cycle of major-version migrations, dependency churn, and build-tool turnover. That argument is real but incomplete, and on its own it has never been decisive: every framework shop has learned to live with the treadmill. There's a stronger case, built on four pillars that compound with each other. First, total cost of ownership : vanilla JavaScript on the web platform has unusual TCO properties, dominated by a depreciation curve that is nearly flat. Code written against the platform does not rot, because its substrate does not change. Over long horizons, this single property outweighs almost every per-feature productivity argument in a framework's favor. Second, the labor market : the pool of people who can work on vanilla JavaScript is not a niche within the frontend market — it is the entire frontend market, plus most of the backend market. Every framework developer is, underneath, a JavaScript developer. The reverse is not true. If you hire for a specific framework, you're hiring from a subset while telling yourself you're hiring from the mainstream. Third, AI leverage : engineers now produce a growing share of code with AI assistance, and the economics of that assistance differ sharply by target. The web platform is a small, stable, exhaustively documented body of knowledge; a framework ecosystem is a large, fast-mutating one whose training data is perpetually stale. AI coding tools are measurably more reliable on the former. As AI-assisted development becomes the dominant mode of production, the substrate that AI handles best becomes the cheaper substrate — and the gap widens every year the platform stays still while frameworks move. Fourth, architecture : porting to Web Components is not a transliteration of the same design into different syntax. The platform pushes toward a genuinely different archi