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!