Plain Vanilla Web

I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments.

Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed.

Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system.

Even ClickOnce deployments -- which you can deploy on the web or on a file share -- pretty much make deployments painless.

EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

I'm sitting on two UIs at work that nobody can really do anything with, because the cutting-edge, mainstream-acceptable frameworks at the time they are built in are now deprecated, very difficult to even reconstruct with all the library motion, and as a result, effectively frozen because we can't practically tweak them without someone dedicating a week just to put all the pieces back together enough to rebuild the system... and then that week of work has to largely be done again in a year if we have to tweak it again.

Meanwhile the little website I wrote with just vanilla HTML, CSS, & JS is chugging along, and we can and have pushed in the occasional tweak to it without it blowing up the world or requiring someone to spend a week reconstructing some weird specific environment.

I'm actually not against web frameworks in the general sense, but they do need to pull their weight and I think a lot of people underestimate their long-term expense for a lot of sites. Doing a little bit of JS to run a couple of "fetch" commands is not that difficult. It is true that if you start building a large enough site that you will eventually reconstruct your own framework out of necessity, and it'll be inferior to React, but there's a lot of sites under that "large enough" threshold.

Perhaps the best way to think about it is that this is the "standard library" framework that ships in the browsers, and it's worth knowing about it so that you can analyze when it is sufficient for your needs. Because if it is sufficient, it has a lot of advantages to it. If it isn't, then by all means go and get something else... again, I'm definitely not in the camp of "frameworks have no utility". But this should always be part of your analysis because of its unique benefits it has that no other framework has, like its 0KB initial overhead and generally unbeatable performance (because all the other frameworks are built on top of this one).