I think the premise of this blog post is flawed.
> During my time using frameworks I've become more and more out of touch with the code I'm writing. For example, when I plonk down a button in the Ionic Framework I get a beautifully engineered and designed button, but it also has 10 CSS classes attached to it that I don't really understand. I sometimes feel like the thing I've created isn't truly "mine".
That seems to be the nature of CSS utility frameworks. Composition over inheritance; or in this case monolithic element styles. Is the utility function to fetch elements from the DOM tree also truly "yours"? Where's the line drawn? I could get the text representation of the DOM tree and write my own parser? How about that?
> I therefore decided to go back to the basics and code my own tiny website. I already knew how to go about it, you probably do too, it's really easy (if you don't know here's how). However, I'd never actually done it, and I'd not made a website without a framework in over a decade.
Ah! And there's the problem! Are you creating a website or an application? I do understand that this feels like a cleansing of sorts. But in my opinion doesn't reinforce the original argument.
I think the more experience you gain as a developer the more often you will come to the realization that technology evolves and also becomes more nuanced over time. When confronted with this fact of course the first instinct will be to feel overwhelmed and return to basics. Which if you're creating a mostly static website in this case is perfectly reasonable. But you can't be an expert in everything. Thus frameworks and tools emerge to alleviate some of the pain that stems from designing applications not websites.
Which again reinforces another often quoted realization: the right tool for the right job.