If I had to use one of these modern JS frameworks, I think Vue without build step would be one of the candidates. No shitty webpack configuring, no minimizer, no bundler, no friggin uglyfier, no juggling modules. None of the crap, just write your JS and serve the script, done.
Totally agree — the ESM build of Vue gives you a great “no-bundler” experience with a full framework behind it.
dagger.js sits in the same no-build space, but deliberately strips it down even further: no VDOM, no reactive system, no SFCs. Just HTML with attributes like +click / +load, and it plays nicely with native Web Components. The trade-off is fewer features, but also less surface area and almost nothing to configure.
So if Vue ESM is “full-featured without the tooling overhead,” dagger.js is more like “minimal glue you can drop in via <script> when you want to stay as close to plain HTML/JS as possible.”
my framework of choice is aurelia. it is probably as fully featured as vue, but at a glance its templating and minimal need for glue code makes it look more similar to dagger.js than vue, to the point that i think it should be easy to convert from aurelia to dagger.js and back.
like vue, by default aurelia uses a build step, but serving it directly from a CDN or your own server is possible. i am actually working on a site that does that right now.
one thing i like about aurelia is that a template and js code are associated by name, so <this-view></this-view> translates to this-view.js: class ThisView {}, this-view.html, this-view.css, so they all form one unit, and i only need to import the js and specify the class name to load and have everything else defined automatically.
if i read https://daggerjs.org/#/module/introduction correctly, then you treat each of those as independent modules, that need to be specified separately.
Your post and comments definitely made me interested in trying it out! Usually I use as little JS as possible, but maybe I have a need for something soon, and then I might try your library/framework!