I’ve been trying to learn React, but I don’t like how far it is from actual Javascript. It’s like learning a new language. Are there any frameworks that are closer to Javascript?
Not to sound like I’m judging your preference but React is not at all far from actual JavaScript save for a few things like JSX, compared to other popular ones.
Perhaps this tutorial can help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ0f1Apb5CU&list=PL4cUxeGkcC9i0_2FF-WhtRIfIJ1lXlTZR This guy gives some great tutorials. You can also find tuts on Vue, Angular, and Angular 2 on that channel if React just isn’t your thing.
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I just finished all the React projects and at first React was just scribble for me. I had to take a free course https://online.reacttraining.com/ which helped me sooo much. Then, from that project I was able to complete all the freecodecamp projects.
I personally think React is the future web development. Its java-like, with the classes. Learning React also helped me learn the new ES6 javascript. Also, create-react-app was a big help because it provides you with a react app with all the babel and webpack configurations completed.
Don’t give up. If I can struggle through learning React, you definitely can. 
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I know what you mean, I just dunno if the question actually make much sense when you break it down. The closer to just JS, the smaller the framework’s API, the more boilerplate, the harder you’ll find it as a beginner.
React is probably the closest out of the current popular frameworks. Its entire API is just a set of functions for efficiently updating a tree structure (just a JS object) representing your app; you then use the ReactDOM library to take that and spit out HTML. JSX is just a way of writing JS objects that looks like HTML. This is possibly one of the reasons people find it hard; it doesn’t really do much apart from that, it takes craploads of boilerplate to do some stuff that seems like it should be simple.
Backbone was an older thing, allows MVC style apps, takes loads of boilerplate. Marionette is the normal view layer library used with it I guess.
Mithril is pretty close to vanilla I guess? Riot? Hyperapp?
Just looking at small frameworks that don’t do a lot on their own.
https://mithril.js.org/
http://riotjs.com/
http://backbonejs.org/
https://hyperapp.js.org/
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Check out VueJS.org … very easy and fast to get up to speed.
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