Yeah, that's totally legit, and what I would default to.
The reason stuff like React exists isn't because it's some big generic library for doing "frontends" that everyone has to use (even though that's how people see it, how it's marketed, and how people use it). If you want to know what a library is good for it's easiest to look at what it was originally built for, the very first problem it solved.
For libs like React, that problem is DOM manipulation.
For most of the interesting things you can build on the web these days, DOM manipulation becomes a problem at some point because the solution has an inherent complexity to it that becomes hard to manage. That complexity is in procedurally updating the DOM, specifically getting the order of insertions and deletions correct and keeping track of every possible state the DOM can be in to make sure your app doesn't get in a weird state that it can't recover from.
The way React (and vue, angular, svelte etc, all the modern libraries) fix that problem is by changing the programming paradigm from procedural to declarative. The declarative paradigm is just fundamentally much simpler for the exact problem of handling DOM manipulation in a large app.
If you're learning, or building something for yourself and not worried about spending time on refactors, then it's definitely worth building something in vanilla JS first, running into some sticky DOM manipulation scenarios yourself, and solving them the hard way. People make the mistake of using React when they don't need to because they don't have a good understanding of where that line is in the inherent complexity of a web page/app, where you start to get a very good returns on bringing React in to simplify some of that complexity.
That's also why I really don't rate vue, angular or svelte. React is a big library in terms of code size (over 100KB still I think?), but almost all of that complexity is internal. The exact same API and functionality is exposed by Preact, which is a few kilobytes. React has a really small API, pretty much just three functions: createElement, render, and useState. I'm a big fan of libraries that do big things with only a few functions. Do one thing well and all that. There's also the JSX transform, which is a straight line for line transform, meaning the code you write is very similar to the code that runs in the browser, you can follow it line by line with no surprises.
React is a good tool to have in the toolkit, after you've gotten comfortable with vanilla JS. I wouldn't write it off based on how other people present it. You just need to avoid the insane amount of complexity and cruft that people have built around it. All that complexity will go away when people go running after the new shiny thing, but React or something very similar to it will stick around for a loooooong time because the fundamental ideas are so simple and powerful. DOM control through declarative coding, code over configuration, utilising the JS language itself as much as possible instead of relying on DSLs, and simple transforms that maintain the integrity of your code all the way to the production build.
If anything replaces React it either have to be quite similar, or be another entire paradigm shift (maybe the whole DOM/CSSOM thing will get replaced at some stage, who knows?)