It comes down the web browser being used for two different use cases and two camps arguing past one another.
Documents vs Programs
The parent is rightfully pointing out that most websites are documents and have no need for client side rendering or interactivity. You are rightfully pointing out that VanillaJS is insufficient to build software in the browser.
Where I imagine you lose some people is that comboboxes can be done natively with the datalist attribute.
> The parent is rightfully pointing out that most websites are documents and have no need for client side rendering or interactivity.
Where does that html come from, then? Do you honestly believe all pages could be static html+css served from some bucket? Or do they need to be rendered by a programm running on a server? Because once you start talking about servers generating pages then all this talk about JavaScript frameworks boils down to arguing where the complexity should be in place A or B.