While you can theoretically get to this level of simplicity with various tools I think the difference isn't so much "can it be this simple?" so much as "does this level of simplicity fit my needs?" and that can be harder to quantify.

The same thing you wrote in PHP done in Node.js in an arbitrarily named file served from root:

require('http').createServer((_, res) => res.end('Hello World')).listen(80);

Zero configuration. You could trivially add some lines from 'fs' to get it to read files instead and whenever you update those files it'll automatically serve the new ones. The problem isn't that it can't be simple. It's that the people cutting checks (or at least the people informing them) also want SSL, non-static pages, sanitized inputs, an attractive interface, log retention, data persistence, ease-of-access, etc.

If people were paying me my current rate to send their users unstyled static text over HTTP I'd gladly walk away from all the process. But if they want me to maintain my sanity while writing a non-trivial web application I think integrating a type checker pays off after the first few thousand lines of code. And if I know things are going to get there from the outset then setting it up in advance isn't exactly insanity.