The vanilla advantage is also there in a pure client-side pwa. Arguably it’s even bigger, because the bundle size ends up way smaller and the agent needs to hold less in context.

Plus all the other vanilla advantages: fewer dependencies, lower maintenance, less retraining, etc…

They also were unnecessary even before AI, the biggest advantage of React over HTMX-style apps was that you could recruit someone more easily but the SPA complexity wasn't worth it and it scaled terribly.

Now that you don't write the code now, I don't see why I would pick React style libraries unless the codebase is already there.

I'm reading that agents can now mash up video games that were written in assembly. At that point I have to wonder if the abstractions are adding anything.

Of course, there is the question of "the human can still understand what is going on", but it's not clear the new frameworks are optimizing for that...