Indeed, it's almost as if web application expectations and requirements have gotten significantly more complex in 10 years time.

Microservices don't reduce technical complexity. If anything they add to it. 10 years ago I didn't have to worry about container orchestration and all that comes with that. New problems present new solutions.

I definitely recognize that the transpilation era of JavaScript feels incredibly bloated. It is exacerbated by the overlap with a lot of the tooling. It's exponentially worse when you try to understand solutions to problems you don't have yet.