You're right of course. One can even create a simple single-page application without using frameworks and external libraries and fit it in 5% of the mentioned size. I built verbatim [1] in 24KB, JS, CSS, all image assets included. It is a an SPA and works pretty fast, scoring 100/100 on both desktop and mobile Google PageSpeed tests.
The issue is when trivial applications grow in complexity. Any custom approach is seldom scalable. Especially when more people are brought on to work on a project and have to get up to speed. There is a strong argument to using popular frameworks (react, angular), which comes at a cost of massive app bundles. It is not, however, reasonable to use for static sites in any case.
The issue is when trivial applications grow in complexity. Any custom approach is seldom scalable. Especially when more people are brought on to work on a project and have to get up to speed. There is a strong argument to using popular frameworks (react, angular), which comes at a cost of massive app bundles. It is not, however, reasonable to use for static sites in any case.
[1] http://verbatim.link/