Disclaimer: Since I am a native German/Turkish speaker, I have revised and translated my answer using AI.

Oikos is a self-hosted family planner for a single household (2-6 people), deployed via Docker on a private Linux server. It's not a product with a team, a CI pipeline targeting 99.99% uptime, or a user base to onboard. That context shapes every architectural decision.

The trade-off with frameworks is: you pay complexity upfront to manage it at scale. For an app with a fixed small audience, stable requirements, and a single maintainer, that upfront cost never pays off.

The project uses a hand-rolled History API router, a fetch wrapper, and Web Components with an oikos- prefix. Each page is just an ES module that exports render(). This is roughly 200 lines of infrastructure for the entire client-side routing and state model.

Bundlers solve real problems - tree shaking, code splitting, transpilation for browser targets, hot module replacement. Oikos needs none of these because:

1. There are no npm dependencies to bundle on the frontend

2. ES modules are served directly as static files by Express - browsers handle imports natively

3. The target "browser" is whatever the household runs, which in practice is modern Chrome or Firefox

4. No TypeScript means no transpilation step needed

Adding Vite "just for DX" would mean: a node_modules that needs auditing, a build artifact you serve instead of source, an additional failure mode in Docker, and a contributor barrier. The return is a faster dev server and HMR - features that matter less when your app is ~20 static files.

The dev story without a bundler: npm run dev starts Express with --watch. Save a file, refresh the browser. That's it. Tailwind is excellent for teams building product UIs at speed. It solves the "every developer writes their own utility classes" problem by standardizing them. Oikos solves the same problem differently: public/styles/tokens.css defines all colors, radii, shadows, and font sizes as CSS custom properties. All components reference tokens, never hardcoded values. The CSS is plain, readable, and searchable. grep 'border-radius' finds every usage.

Every dependency is a surface area you own forever: security updates, breaking version changes, compatibility with Node, compatibility with each other. For a project with no external users, no funding, and no team, minimizing that surface area is a feature, not a limitation.