There's gotta be a better way of programming web applications

Much of the task of building a web application is fetching data and sending it through a pipeline of software to eventually get to the user, and conversely getting the data from the user and sending it back through a pipeline of software to return in the database.

The pipeline consists of apis and interfaces and transformations and validations and authentications and authorizations and sdks and data stores/databases. These take the form of database fields, HTTP APIs web browser input and output components, bits of business logic that transform and make decisions - basically everything that goes to make up an application.

So much of programming is setting the expected ins and outs of each step, and so much debugging is fixing it where the expected ins and outs are wrong.

Surely there has to be a better way that, in a unified and universally programmable way, allows the programmer to assemble a data flow, align the expected input and output fields and specify which bits of code run them.

Does this exist? Or are there projects headed in this direction? It's just silly to be writing code that essentially is dealing with connecting data inputs and outputs together.

I'm not talking about something that dumbs it down for end users, like the well regarded IFFT, but a new and sophisticated approach to programming that is oriented primarily toward defining end to end data flows through sophisticated applications and data stores.

Maybe some sort of universal component that defines data in and out and people write connectors so any and every bit of software talks to it. Good idea, stupid idea?