I don't use any useless frameworks and don't feel any pain.
I am handling form validation without writing a single line of JS and without learning something new by using HTML5 API like required, type="email" with the help of Bunny Validation - #1 World Form Validation library. Docs are a bit outdated, you can now init form validation by adding validator="bunny" to <form>. Later there will be support for multi-steps forms out of the box.