I mean a rapidly changing front end codebase is always going to be entangled mess no matter if it’s react, plain JavaScript or even “native app code”. Front ends are where the rubber meets the road and have to deal with fuzzy weird human shit and miles of edge cases. That is just the nature of the beast.
Even if you attempt to tame it and make “the prefect codebase” it’s still gonna be a mess.
If anything React and typescript help it from being an even larger mess full of homegrown idioms that are normally baked into the framework.
There is no such thing as not using a framework. You either pick an existing one or build your own. Very often the sensible choice is to pick an existing one.
You could always massively reduce the frontend by not duplicating half the backend business logic in the browser. By not having isolated backend/frontend teams off in their own worlds and only using fancy JS where fancy JS is actually needed.
Server rendering of JS only gets you partially in a better state when the fundamental idea is based around generating a massive amount of JS for the browser.