Welcome to developing in 2016-201X, were you spend 60% of your time configuring tooling, 35% developing test and 5% developing your app.
No one is forcing you to use the latest bundler / tool / programming language. Let others experiment. You’ll be happy to reap the benefits of their work when something mature comes out of it.
Except everyone is using them and you get quickly outdated, specially if you are looking for a job with heavy experience on python, php and asp.net web development. The market already shifted to "3 Years worth of experience on Parcel".
Tell me that when you get turned down in a job interview because you don't know <JS framework of the year>.
This stuff comes up in interviews. Trying to avoid answering direct questions about a framework and answering with "Well I can learn it really quickly because I'm a good vanilla JS Dev" doesn't fly all the time. If you can't answer direct questions about a framework, they will pass on you if they get someone who can answer those questions.
It has nothing to do with marketing yourself.
There are tons of companies that are going to do certain things you aren't going to be a fan of. Isn't it better to find out they're not that into mature platforms and prefer the latest trend during the interview and not on the job?
(in JS ecosystem)
1. It's really hard to find something that works
2. It's really hard to figure out all the dependencies, and configs, and plugins, and conventions, and ..., and ... for something that works
3. Once you have it figured out, each and every moving part, including the tool itself, will get updated with deprecations and breaking changes.
I used to love writing code and building stuff from scratch. Nowadays it's exactly what you said. I spend more time configuring stuff and finding tools that work well together than actually writing the underlying code that makes the app or the website work.
In the same time it costs you to boot up notepad.exe and create a HTML wireframe, create-react-app/electron/etc has already set up an application that is modular, knows dependencies and resources, is debuggable, can hot reload, etc. The time you would spend to get this manually ... it wouldn't even be fair to compare.
Most of the times you don't need any of those things, you don't need modularization, you don't need a dependency manager, you don't need a debuggable version (because you are working on plain versions without minifies or module bundlers that compress your code), you don't need hot-reload (because you aren't using a transpiler/compiler-to-js), you don't need the hot-and-untested framework, sometimes you don't even need a source control.
The big difference between that and going from scratch is that you choose what you want based on your needs not because everyone or a framework tells you "this is the right path", current state of web development increases "lego developers" to rise and shine like if they were expert.
I might take 1 day on the feature, and then 3 more days just getting it past the testing gauntlet
Node/JS in general has a pretty terrible track record for me with version hell.