Not really creating a blog in 10 minutes using a framework is very different from learning to build a twitter clone with without one is not comparable in my view.

Back in undergrad I picked up PHP for the first time one day and built a blog with comments in one sitting. Super easy, anyone could do it, no frameworks (or javascript) required.

How did you do ajax requests without js?

Ajax might have existed back then, but it was probably still called "DHTML" :-).

To be honest I'm not really sure why you'd want javascript running on a blog today let alone more than decade ago.