I agree overwhelmingly with this sentiment. I've been working with JavaScript on an almost daily basis for about 20 years. I very much dislike the new JavaScript environment, it's an atrocious monster of unnecessary complexity (and getting ever worse). Just because things could be done, thanks to dramatically faster JS engines, they were.
The product I'm building now: vanilla JS. No npm, no packages, no package managers, no node, no jquery, no react, no vue, no angular, no webpack, no yarn, no frameworks, no polyfills, etc. It's not even using ES6/7. It's gloriously fast, simple, extremely small in size, universal and nothing more than absolutely necessary. Sub 50kb page sizes, 5x faster load times than Quora or Wikipedia, 20% as many requests (the typical Wiki page makes three dozen or more requests), while still accomplishing everything required for the project (it's a knowledge service).
Push these simple pages through a performance checker:
https://www.quora.com/What-made-George-Washington-a-great-Pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey
You'll see 38 requests for Wiki, and 49 for Quora. The simple Quora page has 500kb of scripting junk bloating it and 180kb of css, leading to 1000ms load times. And these are largely considered good outcomes today, that's with billion dollar organizations spending huge sums of money to speed everything up. Oh, the page only has 1mb of unnecessary bloat? A tremendous outcome.
Fuck the new bloated JavaScript and Web dev ecosystem, it needs to crawl back into the hole it came out of and die. There's a better way to build, and it's not by adding vastly more complexity to accomplish the same thing we used to with 5-10kb of JS.