Actually, when 'we didn't need any of this stuff', most of the heavy lifting was with server-side frameworks(Struts, Razor, Rails, etc). The rise of web applications, and in particular single page applications, which are expected to behave very much like desktop apps, initially led to insanely complicated jQuery monstrosities that quickly became unmaintainable. This created the need for front-end frameworks, which led to a lot of churn as people tried to figure out the right approach. Something like Dojo is not all that different from Angular/Ember in concept, it's just an order of magnitude more difficult to work with, or scale an application with.

There's nothing here that seems superfluous when creating a web application. If you want to take advantage of advances to the Javascript language, you're going to have to go either with Babel/Traceur or some other kind of ES6 transpiler, or Typescript, which while ostensibly is it's own language, seems more and more headed to becoming defacto ES7.

If you work with a team of developers and want a modular structure for developing components as opposed to 10,000 line js files, you're going to need some kind of module system / bundler. This is hardly new, it's baked into .Net web projects (forget the name), and stuff like require.js has been around for ages. Webpack is just the latest iteration of that concept.

If you're building an app of any complexity, you're probably going to want to do some unit testing. For that, you'll need a test runner. Karma's a decent choice.