Yes, modern front-end is overcomplicated. The most of developers and stackoverfow copy-paste operators believe that they are not smart and helpless, that's why they believe they have to use framework to build apps, they believe in in a myth that without those tools they wouldn't be able to do so.
Most of the code around the world is also a garbage because many developers don't want to think before making actions. Angular is just a joke I never seen in a software engineering. They not only overengineered everything but also introduced their own "web standards" and forcing everyone to build apps "angular way". React, on the other hand, is good at marketing and promoting their VirtualDOM virtual problem, at least, React suck less, is simple to use and you may understand what the code does. While React was just a tiny library, today it is used together with many other tools, especially, Redux, People are just crazy about that and using it everywhere.
I've seen Angular developer failed to implement a basic feature and asked for help while in Vanilla JS it would take couple of simple plain functions. Developers with all that tools are putting themselves into cage and later seeking for help. Stop making problems for yourself.
There is no "new JS", yes, there is ES6 which was a first major upgrade in a specification for long time, but it still is one of the most flexible, powerful and simplest language in the world.
The irony here is - language designed to be very simple and which could be used even by designers somehow become a huge community which totally broken that JavaScript's philosophy of simplicity and transformed JavaScript into overengineered hell without any standards.
The problem with modern world is that there is a huge amount of information today and it is impossible to know everything. Marketing is a reason why we know about something and the absence of advertising is why we don't know about something. Angular and React just have huge marketing and support from big companies, while you won't find someone wasting a lot of money to sell you JavaScript itself. We also see it today in social media with fake news and violence. Good people and products don't need popularity, real heroes are never known and stay behind the scenes. Most of the things you will try to market will just stay on the background unseen because of the bright light of giant products on the foreground.
There is a reason why Web Standards exists, why they evolve so slow and why it takes time to implement them. It is one of the biggest problems in software engineering - supporting single technology and code which should be able to run on many different environments and architectures (web, mobile, desktop, phones, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc).
Instead of writing another framework or library which will never solve your problem - develop the Web Standards.
Instead of blindly following all the popular stuff, I always recommend to software engineers learn software engineering, language itself, software design and architecture patterns, good practices and web standards.
More about what front-end engineer should learn - What languages, frameworks and libraries should I learn in order to start front-end development?
Read more: Is modern front-end overcomplicated? - Hashnode and Quora answers