Well, while frameworks require a bit of boilerplate, it makes large projects MUCH more maintainable. Back in the bad old days, yes, you could bang out a bunch of features very quickly in JQuery, but as the size of the site increased there were lots of opportunities for disparate sections of code to interfere with each other. Additionally, there are serious performance concerns using jquery for any significant number of DOM mutations, which most of the major frameworks solve. Finally, you can't just arbitrarily mutate the DOM in these frameworks, so you can't use jquery willy-nilly if you're using them.
Some frameworks reduce boilerplate by implementing features for you in their way so that tiny trivial tweaks require reverse engineering the framework and maintaining your own fork of the framework. Hopefully generators that scaffold boilerplate instead of hiding features in the framework stay to pick up more.
