I have a suspicion the reason most people reach for a framework is primarily about two different things: modern tooling (modules/bundling, typescript, etc) and templating. They don't really "need" a virtual dom diffing rendering pipeline, but the fact that you get all these other things out of the box with little setup is what makes it the go-to solution.

Then of course you're left to reimplement basic browser functionality that you now lost (or more likely, you just grab another package that solves that and throw it in your payload).