You can still work with vanilla PHP, jQuery, and vanilla CSS if the project allows it. Things are more complex typically because the requirements are more complex.

What used to be a simple <form> and a redirect now requires client-side validation, dynamic forms, an API endpoint to POST, reactivity, client-side templating and data binding, etc.

> TailwindCSS to make styling easier

Wait the article complains about complexity and the suggests using Tailwind?