This has always been the promise of e.g. PHP. There's been a ton of people who were complete novices, whose first lines of code were a .php file that they uploaded over FTP to some shared hosting.

What I will grant is that a novice is going to be completely lost if they try to start with a "modern" app. There's way too many moving parts. When webpack (implicitly included in e.g. create-react-app) fails to build because something's wrong in an implicit dependency, a novice is going to be totally screwed.