The reason is to avoid npm/node. And that's absolutely right -- I'm a backend engineer, and I've done Vue projects with npm, and npm is fantastic -- the quality and care that has gone into it is obvious; even the screen output is beautiful (compared e.g. to the mess that JVM developers make, who think of a shell as some weird thing that someone might need to use if their IDE is broken).

However. For the OP's question, a toolset for quick and easy frontend development for a backend engineer who doesn't spend much time doing front end, avoiding npm is definitely the way forwards. It introduces a HUGE amount of complexity to a project who's aim was simply: produce some HTML and CSS with the necessary javascript to make the UI work. If your typescript compiler or Vue/React transpiler or bundler isn't working quite right, it is completely non-obvious to a backend engineer who isn't familiar with npm what to change in package.json to fix it, or even how to go about debugging it.

Point taken; I admit I wrote that as a sort of frustration and reaction to the abundance of comments telling a newb at front-end developer to just take the deep dive and start installing a bunch of NPM packages / CLI tools. In my opinion, those tools hide amazing layers of complexity that become a problem as soon as you need to eject. I think any beginner at front-end development should realistically start by getting used to the bread 'n butter of HTML/CSS/Vanilla JS, things the browser already understands. Only once you start feeling the limitation of those tools should you start including libraries, and then maybe a package manager and view layer.

I think it just depends what you want to build. Once your UI reaches a certain level of complexity, the benefits of various tools begin to outweigh the cost.

If you know you're going to end up at that point because your designs include a high level of interactivity, you might as well use tools that will support your needs from the beginning--either that or revise the designs to be less ambitious.

Often newbies have a vision of what they want to build that matches the complexity/polish of established products--they're building Uber for X or Instagram for Y and so they want that same silky smooth UX. To achieve that, they are going to need a lot of packages and tools. The solution in that case isn't necessarily to convince them to build the whole thing in vanilla html/css/js instead, but to level with them about their expectations being unrealistic for where they're at.

> Once your UI reaches a certain level of complexity, the benefits of various tools begin to outweigh the cost.

What's that certain level of complexity? I have some heuristics I might use, but what I've noticed is that even discussion about where these product behavior thresholds are seems to be rare.

And "polish" and "silky smooth" don't seem like features that come automatically with any of the top frameworks either, nor things that are inherently difficult without them.

But the earlier comment was saying to avoid NPM/Next/React because of the challenges that arise when you want to eject and add complexity. However, not using NPM/Next/React also comes with challenges when you want to add complexity.

In my mind, the best advice for beginners is to just follow the mainstream. You'll get the best tutorials, best community support, easiest tooling, and least fragmentation. First time using a computer? Mac or Windows. First time programming? Javascript. Just want to do simple web dev? NPM and React. After you've got the basics down you can start exploring the niche stuff like Linux or Rust or Htmx.