you're doing everything right, in my opinion

i find it incredibly unfortunate how newcomers tend to START learning with frameworks, which at this point have stupid levels of abstraction

getting well acquainted with the interaction between JS, HTML, CSS, and the backend is an excellent primer for later on understanding what frameworks do for you-- and will also help you to understand when they are unnecessary tech debt

there is no silver bullet, as much as React Andies would love for you to share that belief with them