If anyone is looking for a clean JS charting framework, I highly recommend Observable Plot.

It's from the creator of D3 and it's much easier than using raw D3. I've been using it outside the Observable platform for debug charts and notebooks, and I find its output crisp and its API very usable.

It doesn't try to have all the bells and whistles, and I'm not even sure if it has animations. But for the kind of charts you see in papers and notebooks I think it covers a lot.