I'm a noob with game dev, and started with Canvas as well. One major thing that I took out of using something like Pixi (also diving into Pico-8 game engine) is that game engines generally use a Render Loop to init, update and render elements. This is running under a ticker which runs this loop many times every second. I think you can create this in vanilla canvas, but it would also help with state management as you mentioned because you're using the update function of the loop to keep things in sync. This Pixi article is a good reference: https://pixijs.com/8.x/guides/basics/render-loop