It really isn't. Teaching newbies to venerate JSX and React is far more harmful in my opinion: it does a really good job of hiding what's actually going on.
These days vanilla JS DOM APIs are pretty straightforward. It's well worth learning them and using them on small projects where a library like React is absurd overkill.
It’s not veneration it’s the idea that devs should understand the way things work underneath the over engineered abstractions FAANGs developed so they could onboard new grads to web development faster.
What is tantamount to educational malpractice is the pathological revulsion javascript developers have for their own language, such that merely teaching newbies how to actually write it without six proxies, three other languages and a framework to protected them is considered harmful.
Sure, either Javascript is an intrinsically good language, and you should therefore be able to use it as is, or it is not good, in which case the sane response would be to use it as little as possible. Every language has warts, but most can at least go out in public without layers of makeup.
>either Javascript is an intrinsically good language, and you should therefore be able to use it as is, or it is not good, in which case the sane response would be to use it as little as possible.
That's a false dichotomy. There is no such thing as an intrinsically good or bad language, and if the use of frameworks demonstrated the intrinsic flaws of a language, then all web-facing languages would be equally flawed, because no one avoids using frameworks in any of them.
Learning how to write "vanilla" JS (that term really bugs me) and how the DOM actually works is valuable regardless of whether the scale of most modern applications makes it efficient or cost effective to do so.
