Front-end developers could solve all of this by just learning the base technologies of HTML, HTTP, CSS, and JS really well and ignoring everything else. We're at a beautiful point in web development where browsers are finally unified on open standards, and we're all too locked into these outdated JS frameworks to take advantage of it.
I've been around the block with popular front-end frameworks. The first one I've truly found to be a joy to use is Mithril.
Unlike React, a framework that's gotten a lot of buzz here lately, it's more than just a view library. There is a routing paradigm in place along with a few other goodies. Yet it all weighs in at Check out its performance compared to a few other popular frameworks: