vanilla is the finest of the flavors

This article encouraging starting with "vanilla" javascript intersects with some of my own preferences.

There are some things that are worth not doing from scratch: templating, routing, testing, etc, but even then there's a lot you can do with special purpose libraries rather than overarching frameworks. You then get the pleasure of debugging in a code base that solves just the problem at hand, and is generally bespoke and with business-logic-mirroring stacktraces.

That said, I'm surprised how much one can do while still missing huge swaths of basic Javascript! Take a look at the docs for JS's "Object"... there's more there than you might think - stuff like the prototype chain, the getters and setters... you can go a long way and do a lot of things without realizing they're in there... but then when you have to read someone else's code that uses them, you should be aware.