Osmose

I really enjoy Phaser and have been using it for years, although not professionally or on projects with urgency or large requirements.

It has a lot of stuff compared to raw canvas, way more than I could list, but some highlights would be:

• It handles the game loop, variable FPS, loading assets, timing events, etc. A lot of the busy work of writing a game that wants an update loop instead of an event-based model like websites default to.
• Drawing is stateful—if you want to draw a sprite, instead of writing a draw call that runs every frame, you create a "sprite" game object with a position, rotation, alpha, tint, etc. and Phaser will draw it every frame for you.
• It has multiple physics engine options integrated with these game objects available out of the box.
• It has a ton of different game objects or abstractions that are typically useful for a game, like tilemaps (isometric, orthogonal, hex, staggered), bitmap fonts, particle emitters, tweens, etc.
• Notably, it does 2d stuff like the game above using WebGL without you having to know anything about it, which lets you leverage GPU-bound perf improvements. It can do 3d games as well, though I've not touched that part much.

I think the only time I'd consider not using Phaser for a web-based game would be either if I want to use something like Godot or Unity to export a big complex 3d game to the web, or if the game I was making was well-suited to an event-based programming model and could be made using mostly DOM-based graphics.

Also while it was a little confusing to figure out the boilerplate from the docs at first, it's actually a pretty small amount of work to get started with it. I made a Glitch starter project a while back that you can remix to get something running to mess around with immediately: https://glitch.com/~phaser-vite-starter