I started with Motorola 68000 assembly in the late 70's early 80's (hobbyist not old enough at that time to work) while their where frameworks of sorts back then there really was not what we have to day. I can assure you though when you built stuff of enough abstraction you ended up with your own frameworks that helped you build new applications. Patterns of the way you do things and tried and true methods. Packaged up into reusable libraries.
You see it in every discipline, game programmers use game engines which are frameworks almost nobody is writing their engine from scratch because they don't need frameworks.
Enterprise programmers have saleforce, SAP etc. Hardly anyone is writing an ERP from scratch.
It's not that a lot of people that use frameworks don't know how to go it alone, I certainly do and most of the caliber of developers I work with certainly do. It's just that we realize we will, in the end, end up with something that looks like a framework. Because there was a day and time when that's exactly what we did and it was common practice. But that practice came with the additional overhead of training people on an internal framework, as well as maintaining documentation and the codebase of said custom framework.
It was more common and more acceptable before the internet and opensource that a developer or team would roll their own framework, create their own patterns and procedures and it was a very common practice to roll your own framework. But their where commercially available frameworks at the time for things like computer graphics, UI etc. Frameworks are a natural evolution of code reuse. The difference is today people tend to agree on third party frameworks as a standard way to develop as opposed to internally develop them. IN a effort to externalize, training, support and documentation of the framework.
I understand your frustration with developers conflating a simple page with SPA's. I only build large SPA applications I am not a web page developer, but if all I needed to do was provide a landing page, I would not use a framework because 90% of the deliverable is HTML and CSS. It's a lot of overhead to bring in something like React and the NPM build ecosystem because you have one tiny component of an otherwise static page.
You see it in every discipline, game programmers use game engines which are frameworks almost nobody is writing their engine from scratch because they don't need frameworks.
Enterprise programmers have saleforce, SAP etc. Hardly anyone is writing an ERP from scratch.
It's not that a lot of people that use frameworks don't know how to go it alone, I certainly do and most of the caliber of developers I work with certainly do. It's just that we realize we will, in the end, end up with something that looks like a framework. Because there was a day and time when that's exactly what we did and it was common practice. But that practice came with the additional overhead of training people on an internal framework, as well as maintaining documentation and the codebase of said custom framework.
It was more common and more acceptable before the internet and opensource that a developer or team would roll their own framework, create their own patterns and procedures and it was a very common practice to roll your own framework. But their where commercially available frameworks at the time for things like computer graphics, UI etc. Frameworks are a natural evolution of code reuse. The difference is today people tend to agree on third party frameworks as a standard way to develop as opposed to internally develop them. IN a effort to externalize, training, support and documentation of the framework.
I understand your frustration with developers conflating a simple page with SPA's. I only build large SPA applications I am not a web page developer, but if all I needed to do was provide a landing page, I would not use a framework because 90% of the deliverable is HTML and CSS. It's a lot of overhead to bring in something like React and the NPM build ecosystem because you have one tiny component of an otherwise static page.