I see that a lot in the JS world, "libraries over frameworks" and all that.
The result is that when you go from project to project, people solve the same problems, again and again, in a different way. And create their own custom abstractions, badly tested and documented.
Eventually, the API you could "keep cached in your head" lead to a system you MUST keep in your head because it's very hard to follow how things work and you need to remember it all to be productive. Debugging, extending and onboarding suffers.
Another consequence is that there is still no Django/RoR equivalent in JS. Building any medium size app is a total waste of time, doing the same boiler plate over and over for problems solved 10 years ago.
Everybody has a boilerplate one of course. Nothing is standardized, so the ecosystem is not reusable. Any pluggable library must carefully chosen, then be manually integrated in your own Frankenstein creature, not to mention you end up with a TON of dependencies.
Vue doesn't have a big API. I learned the entire of vue in an afternoon.
It took me 2 weeks to understand react, and much more to actually write decent code with it. Practically, react is very unproductive without something like create-react-app because you have to take so many decisions about it for every new project. Simple things like placing a setInterval()/clearInterval() at the right place, or conditionally settings classes on stuff is not straightforward, anything more complicated must be meticulously though.
Because of this, when I give a training in react and one in Vue, the people from the vue training will immediately be 3 times more productive: their projects move faster, it rarely hit a read block later. I also get way, way less questions in the vue training.
Let's not confuse "barebone API" and "easy API". It's not the same.