All this Javascript machinery does so little. Most sites aren't implementing something like Google Earth, which needs heavy machinery to make it go. They're not implementing a multiplayer game in the browser. They're not using WebGL to display and edit 3D engineering drawings. 90% of web pages just display some static text and images with some forms and buttons, just like they did 10 years ago. There's a little more work required to deal with the screen size and form factor between desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone, but mostly it's basic content.

Yet the amount of code needed to do this has increased by huge amounts, and it churns constantly. Something is very wrong here.

The bad part of this is the disappearance of WYSIWYG editors for HTML. You weren't supposed to write this stuff by hand. That wasn't the plan. Tim Bernars-Lee's first browser had an editor. Mozilla had an editor. Microsoft had FrontPage. There used to be good open source editors. There was Nvu (dead)[1], and then Kompozer (abandoned)[2] Now, about the only thing left is Dreamweaver, which you now have to rent by the month. (Is BlueGriffon any good?) You didn't need a "content management system" unless you were constantly publishing new content, like a newspaper.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvu [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KompoZer