Seconded. My brother got into frontend dev (JS mainly) so sometimes I probe him for what's being used. Each time I do this there's a new thing. And the JS tooling? my fucking god, how I despise it. The opaqueness of it all, the mountains of boilerplate code and files I need to download to do things "by the book". Whenever I dip my toes there I always long for the simplicity of my backend PHP setup and almost always try to ditch what's cool and new and do things as vanilla as possible.
I've been writing personal frontend projects mostly in vanilla JS for over a year now. "Mostly vanilla JS", because I occasionally pull in a routing library (you'd probably do the same in PHP).
Modern JS (modules, web components, fetch, ...) is rather expressive and powerful, and you absolutely do not need to pull in a framework and twelve third-party hype technologies to get a small project up and running.
Or maybe I'm just getting fucking old & grumpy ;)