I definitely have to agree that the complexity of “front end development”, as a role, has increased drastically, meaning there is much less time to dedicate to learning and applying these types of traditionalist techniques, compared to pragmatically and quickly implementing things with heavy framework usage.

I also think there is a bit of a vicious circle with that mindset. When people use frameworks they tend to build more complicated things than they might without those frameworks, which makes plain ol’ CSS/ JS look like an untenable solution. When I think of building an app with plain CSS and JS with only jQuery, I think of it as a helpful constraint that will lead to simpler code and simpler functionality, not to mention what could be megabytes less of tools and frameworks that users will need to load.