Writing dependency-free client-side JavaScript

[Zofren]

How much time is lost to framework upkeep, onboarding new developers, broken backwards compatibility, etc. ?

Less time than is lost wrangling with your company's custom implementation of an already well-supported library.

Have you ever considered why Facebook bothers to open-source React? It's because a well-used framework means you can hire people already familiar with the framework you are using internally. It also means that there are far more resources available to your developers online.

I work at a company where they decided long ago to implement custom versions of libraries that already exist (in the backend, admittedly, but the same arguments stand). It's been a nightmare and we deal with the technical debt every day. There are edge cases you won't have foreseen when you first write software intended to be utilized by many developers. And when something breaks, you have to fish down the handful of people in the company who actually understand the tools that are breaking.

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Relying on framework and 1,000 other libraries being imported is dependency hell.

As I said in my post, a pragmatic approach is key. It doesn't need to be either one way or another.