Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any good approaches for doing this without a specific framework?
Not really, for interactive UI development you need to model the UI as a pure function (no state in the view). So that limits you to React or React-like approaches, and game engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJr_TD1BtF0 For backed web development (in Clojure at least) there isn't really a lot of state in the first place - request comes in, request comes out, state is in the database not the application - so th…
Node.js has a package called piping that hot-reloads require()ed files. It makes interactive development possible. Checkout my backend and frontend interactive isomorphic starterkit: https://github.com/RickWong/react-isomorphic-starterkit It hot-reloads Node server code and client code your browser.