It's exceedingly unlikely that anyone, in this day and age, would set out to build a large scale JavaScript application without the help of libraries, a framework, or both. Let's refer to these collectively as tools, since we're more interested in using the tools that help us scale, and not necessarily which tools are better than other tools. At the end of the day, it's up to the development team to decide which tool is best for the application we're building, personal preferences aside.

Guiding factors in choosing the tools we use are the type of components they provide, and what these are capable of. For example, a larger web framework may have all the generic components we need. On the other hand, a functional programming utility library might provide a lot of the low-level functionality we need. How these things are composed into a cohesive feature that scales, is for us to figure out.

The idea is to find tools that expose generic implementations of the components...