It would be easier if "the browser" is just one target.

As it is, there multiple browsers supporting different levels of features.

That's the whole reason why frameworks are made in the first place dating back to jQuery.

The days of IE6 which justified jQuery are long gone.

All browsers that matter now support a solid common set of features which should be sufficient for the vast majority of cases.

> All browsers that matter now support a solid common set of features which should be sufficient for the vast majority of cases.

All it takes is one of those non majority use cases and you're going to need some kind of dependency to get things consistent

Frameworks like Vue 3 don't actually work on older browsers since it requires ES2016 support in the browsers.. that means IE 11 and older browsers are out. With Svelte you need Microsoft Edge (IE 11 is not supported). Also, it requires Firefox 74 (released in 2020) or newer Firefox versions.

With React, you can make it work with older browsers using Polyfill etc.

You still can‘t style select elements in anything but brand new alpha chrome. It‘s been 20 years since that feature was requested.

> The discussion is whether or not we need a higher level API than that.

Try using DOM APIs to build anything remotely complex or interactive. There's a reason everyone who only uses browser APIs ends up just dumping strings into the DOM via innerHtml.

> Try using DOM APIs to build anything remotely complex or interactive.

I think the core question is: Are we building something complex or interactive. I don't see the need for React or other frameworks unless you're storing a lot of mutable states client-side. But more often than not, all I see is replicating the database through API endpoints.

Any user facing website that is not a portfolio site is interactive. The days where the web is display-only are long past.

„The browser“ doesn‘t exist. So no, we don‘t have one.