What boilerplate? React is all the rage now and it looks a hell of a lot like a backbone view. It has an initialize function, render, events, some constants, and the handlers for events. I don't know how much more minimal you can get than that.

As for the unmaintainable part, I couldn't disagree more. Maybe you've worked with poor programmers?

Really it is the requirement to to redefine your model in backbone that is a deal breaker. Alot of code that just don't have to write in other frameworks, although i understand why it is there.

Most of the unmaintainable comes from it being a lighter weight frame work so devs often fall back to jquery. This is OK if you can figure out exactly where they added that trigger. Way to often that is overly hard. It could be pages away.

And yes, most of my coworkes are poor programmers. Saddly that is the world we live in and I like frameworks that make them a little easier to live with.

The issue I've seen with backbone apps, even written by "good programmers", is that no two are alike. So, when you come into a new app, a nontrivial amount of time is spent figuring out how the original programmers are using it, which libraries they pulled in for stuff like model validations, etc.

To be fair, that's somewhat due to the fact that I mostly encounter them in consulting arrangements, and I don't know that any of the other frameworks are much better in this respect. I think I've just gotten spoiled by doing most of my work in Rails, a mature opinionated framework.