Ask HN: Is there no hope of scalability using only plain, vanilla JS?

I love JS, it's served me very well for all my needs. But seems like more and more of JS has been mutated to serve someone's paradigm. Although I've developed in Angular 1.x, react, backbone, and knockout, I've yet to have any amazing epiphany.

Sure, two-way binding, separation of logic, MV(whatever) yada yada yada. But what about the language itself? Why is JS so unusable by itself that we have to have a new framework that "fills in the gap"?

I have no problem with framework and I try to use them whenever possible, but I still would love to just apply a design pattern around plain JS.

Am I foolish? is there something wrong with using JS by itself?