I've done it a dozen times in gamedev, where interfaces and interactivity are routinely built from scratch without any help of a framework. I didn't work on web applications in 2010, but even with the clusterfuck that the web is I find it difficult to believe it was that hard to do.
From scratch is often way easier than in a browser-compatible way.
It's no accident that after certain complexity people will just go for a blank canvas (afaik Google docs is also canvas-rendered).
The problem is that for drag n drop you mostly want to support normal dom.
even with the clusterfuck that the web is I find it difficult to believe it was that hard to do
This is how I feel about global illumination. Game devs claim it's hard but they're just noobs who don't know how to write a lighting shader.
I'm not a game dev, but it can't be that hard.
so in short, you haven't done "this" work, you have done work in another field with different technical limitations that also has the concept of "drag and drop".
serious question, why, when people from a field you are unfamiliar with tell you that something has particular constraints in that field, do you confidently assert that you know better?
It could be absolutely exasperating, even in 2010 (especially then since browser support for touch events was still shaking out).
The problem is that even without a framework, you didn’t have a blank slate (which would have been better). You had a moving target of blank slates, you had platform differences, you had drag vs touch-drag, entrenched older browsers and the simple frustration of testing on an array of real devices, all sorts.
Now, if you were talking about 2015, then it starts to get a bit flatter.