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you can't just get away with using "plain JS with Jquery" without it becoming an unmaintainable mess and writing boilerplate DOM manipulation code all over the place.Nonsense. Maintainability is all about good documentation, neat code, sensible peer-reviewed code, a good dose of manual testing and a healthy injection of personal responsibility in seeing the project be the best it can be for your users.
I test my work manually on a bunch of test devices and computers I own. It doesn't take long and I get to see any browser specific display glitches that automation tools wouldn't pick up. It's a no-brainer, and you LEARN about the nature of browsers by testing manually.
I hate bootstrap, don't use it. I've made big website templates with lots of traffic, and smaller components and other things. I don't want bootstrap in the mix thanks. Whenever I have to maintain a project which someone else started with bootstrap, I sigh and dive into the ridiculous use of simulated rows and columns, and the crappy CSS overrides meant to give us flexibility, but actually giving us not much at all.
So how do other developers like my work when they have to maintain it? Well, I leave them something SIMPLE and well documented to decipher, so they can get straight to work doing the maintenance and getting on with business. No learning curves of countless toolsets and pre-processing junk. Just the basics. I've had no complaints.
Frontend is very much concerned with visual elements and interaction. I don't know much about server side except for what I find behind the projects I work on and fetch with AJAX or other means... such and such data feeds, this or that outputs etc. I'm more interested in user interfaces and how a web app or webpage "feels". I know exactly what to do when something doesn't feel snappy, or a graphic flashes or renders poorly on load. I know what to do because I haven't sold my soul to a framework that promised me the world, but delivered mediocrity.
Each to their own.