Sure, I made most of my games without an engine, and those that used one are made with Twine and Ren’Py. Nothing wrong with games for the terminal, either; made my first finished roguelike for the Spectrum!

nowdays i code all my games in pure javascript

I've been developing games as a hobby for decades. I've tried various engines and different approaches, from creating games directly using DirectX, to building games in assembly language, to making small games with Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, and some very small and obscure engines like OpenBOR.

Personally, I agree with you; IDEs like VS Code are usually more convenient to use, but it depends on what you want to achieve. Creating a stable and optimal framework to run your game typically takes time and requires knowledge, so I only recommend it to people who specifically want to learn that aspect of game development.

The advantage of an engine is that it usually saves you that part of the work and allows people to jump straight into developing their game instead of getting bogged down in technical details.

Lately, due to time constraints, I've been using Python and VS Code, and most of what I have now on Itch is built that way.

Coding without an engine is like making a car without an engine. It's totally doable, but you're insane if you do it.

I coded without an engine with Claude Code. I know people give AI coding a bad rep but it's really good these days. I do have coding experience so I knew what I was prompting and it saved me hundreds of hours of coding and debugging. I also needed to make my own engine because of the novel way my game's rendering is done (using past light-cones with a delayed-time rendering system).